In English, the word “medicine” means both medicine and drugs, and it can also be used as internal medicine, which shows how close the relationship between internal medicine and drugs is! It should be said that internal therapeutics is pharmacotherapy, and with pharmacotherapy, there is internal medicine. Then, can we also say that there has been medical oncology since there is anti-tumor drug therapy? Tumors have been around since ancient times, and so have drug therapies. In 1500 B.C., it was recorded that arsenical ointment was used to treat ulcerated “tumors” in Egypt, and in 400 B.C., it was mainly treated with corrosive agents, and until 150 B.C., it was mainly treated with topical drugs. Little was known about this disease at the time and the assumptions were rather vague. According to Galen, an oncologist who was the physician to the Roman emperor Marc Aurel, the normal body fluid would be red blood; between the blood and the “black bile”, malignant fluid was assumed to be the cause of the tumor. This view was regarded as an immutable doctrine until more than two hundred years ago. Galen wrote a book on tumor diseases in which he distinguished more than 60 types of tumors, and at the end of the book he wrote: “There is no question of tumors that is not clear”. He believed that people in the future need not bother to study the diagnosis of tumors, but only how to regulate body fluids so as to cure them. Thereafter, until the middle of the 19th century, humoral therapy was popular for thousands of years. This should be considered as medical oncology treatment! The application of medicine to treat, for example, esophageal cancer has been recorded in China for more than 2,000 years. There are also discussions on the etiology and pathogenesis of tumors. It is recorded in “Spiritual Bier” that “the entry of deficiency evil into the body is also deep, cold and heat fight each other, and stay for a long time and inside the …… hair for tendon slip …… combined with intestinal slip, …… for xi tumor.” The “Medical Zong Jin Jian” said that the loss of glory evidence by “worry, thought, joy and anger, qi depression and blood reversal, and fire condensation.” The basic can be summarized as qi stagnation, blood stasis, phlegm and dampness, evil toxins N heat, organ dysregulation, qi deficiency and blood deficiency and other causes. Treatment is based on herbal medicines that clear heat and detoxify, invigorate blood circulation and remove blood stasis, soften hardness and disperse knots, and support the correctness and compensate the root. Emphasis is placed on the therapeutic strategy of identifying the evidence, supporting the righteousness and eliminating the evil, and drug treatment. This should probably be regarded as the ancient internal tumor treatment! Undeniably, due to the limitation of ancient scientific and technological conditions, it was difficult to make great progress in traditional tumor treatment methods. In the 19th century, due to the development of optical technology, man invented the microscope. German pathologist R. Virchow studied tumor with the help of microscope and realized that cancer is a kind of cellular malignancy and its formation is related to cells, which cannot be explained by abnormal body fluids from the perspective of “overall pathology”. Since then, surgical treatment has taken the place of drug treatment. Such therapies as humoral therapy fell out of favor. However, it was soon discovered that after surgical resection, the majority of patients would recur or develop distant metastases. As a result, the expansion of surgical scope became the orientation of surgical oncology for more than 100 years, and various radical procedures, even extended radical procedures, came into being. However, the above recurrence problem could not be solved, and the search for new treatment became the direction of research at that time. In 1932, the French reported the earliest experimental study of the effect of alkylating agents on tumors. Mustard gas was able to inhibit Ehrlich carcinoma in a mouse test, leading to clinical use in the treatment of breast cancer, and tumor regression was observed. As you can imagine, a poison gas that was used in World War I would have been difficult to introduce into oncology treatment at that time. This otherwise important discovery was hard to ignore! In 1945, a ship carrying 100 tons of mustard gas docked in the port of Bari (Italian city) was sunk and the gas spread in the water of the port. Not only those who participated in the disinfection, but also those who bathed at a great distance were exposed to the mustard gas combined with the oil film on the water of the port. Early effects manifested as shock and decreased blood pressure, partially causing death or recovery after 1-3 days. Large areas of skin contact were blistered. The “after-effects” are severe leukopenia and partial granulocyte deficiency, with some deaths due to concurrent infections. The “Barry disaster” caused by mustard gas became the starting point for the use of alkylating agents in treatment. This was an opportunity to conduct systematic pharmacological research. Since then, a series of derivatives have been synthesized in various countries. At present, the clinically used nitrogen mustard, cyclophosphamide, isocyclophosphamide, azamethine, and tumor coronene are all in this category. In addition, various other chemotherapeutic drugs have been synthesized or extracted over the years. It can be said that nitrogen mustard is an epoch-making drug, which opened up a new era of modern chemotherapy. Among the alkylating agents, the most successful one is cyclophosphamide, which, together with the antimetabolite 5-fluorouracil, is known as a milestone in chemotherapy for oncology in the late 1950s for its superior therapeutic effect and low therapeutic toxicity. By the 1960s, the use of multidrug combination chemotherapy was introduced. Due to the increasing number of effective chemotherapeutic agents and their increasing efficacy, the name Medical Oncology was formally introduced by Karnofsky in 1968, marking the formation of a new discipline in tumor therapy due to the increase of drugs, the application of cell proliferation kinetics and the development of immunology. By the early 1970s, the advent of adriamycin and cisplatin led to another dramatic improvement in the level of oncology treatment, which is known as the second milestone in medical oncology treatment. In the 1990s, the application of the third band of drugs, such as paclitaxel, docetaxel, elitecan, vincristine and gemcitabine, made the tumor treatment effect reach a new level, among which the most representative drugs, paclitaxel and camptothecin, with their unique principle of action and superior efficacy, were called the third milestone of chemotherapy. in the 1980s and 1990s, some more effective endocrine therapeutic drugs and biological In the 1980s and 1990s, some more effective endocrine therapeutic agents and biological immunomodulators were used in tumor clinical practice, and in the last decade, the emergence of targeted therapeutic agents has enriched the family of antitumor drugs, improved the therapeutic effect of medical oncology, and promoted the vigorous development of medical oncology, showing a bright future for medical oncology treatment. At present, the concept of integrated treatment of tumors with chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy is increasingly accepted. This organic integrated treatment using surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy can cure about one-third to forty-five percent of tumor patients. Early stage tumors such as esophageal cancer, gastric cancer and colorectal cancer can be cured by surgery alone in more than 80% of patients. The cure rate of mid-stage tumors can be increased through comprehensive treatment including chemotherapy. Some tumors may be cured by chemotherapy even at advanced stages, such as choriocarcinoma, malignant lymphoma, leukemia, neuroblastoma, Ewing’s tumor, nephroblastoma, etc. It should be said that after more than 40 years of development, Medical Oncology (MO) has now become an increasingly mature discipline whose mission is to apply chemical drugs, endocrine agents, immunomodulators, biologically targeted drugs and Chinese medicine to serve tumor patients.