Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer, and History

Front Cover
Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM, Apr 29, 2004 - History - 320 pages
An absorbing and unsettling history of breast cancer told through the stories of women who have confronted it from ancient times to the present.

A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year

In 1967, an Italian surgeon touring Amsterdam’s Rijks museum stopped in front of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath and noticed an asymmetry to Bathsheba’s left breast; it seemed distended, swollen near the armpit, discolored, and marked with a distinctive pitting. The physician learned that Rembrandt’s model, Hendrickje Stoffels, later died after a long illness. He conjectured that the cause of her death was almost certainly breast cancer.

In Bathsheba’s Breast, James S. Olson traces the history of breast cancer through women’s experiences of the disease across epochs and continents. The stories range from the sixth-century Byzantine empress Theodora, who chose to die rather than lose her breast to Dr. Jerri Nielson, who was evacuated from the South Pole in 1999 after performing a biopsy on her own breast and self-administering chemotherapy.

Olson explores every facet of the disease: medicine’s evolving understanding of its pathology and treatment options; its cultural significance; the political and economic logic that has dictated the terms of a war on a “woman’s disease”; and the rise of patient activism.

“An invaluable aid to those breast cancer survivors with an interest in taking the long view of their illness.” —Nick Owchar Los Angeles Times
 

Contents

PROLOGUE Across Time
1
CHAPTER TWO Unkindest Cut of All THE ORIGINS OF THE MASTECTOMY
27
CHAPTER THREE William Stewart Halsted and the Radical Mastectomy
45
CHAPTER FOUR Superradicals and the Medicine of Mutilation
65
CHAPTER FIVE New Beginnings ASSULT ON THE RADICAL MASTECTOMY
86
CHAPTER SIX Beauty and the Breast THE GREAT AMERICAN OBSESSION
100
CHAPTER SEVEN Out of the Closet BREAST CANCER IN THE 1970S
124
CHAPTER EIGHT Patient Heal Thyself QUACKS AND CURES IN THE AGE OF NARCISSISM
145
CHAPTER NINE Choices MEDICAL TREATMENT IN THE AGE OF LIBERATION
171
CHAPTER TEN The Breast Cancer Wars
192
CHAPTER ELEVEN The Breast Cancer Wars
221
Epilogue THE NEW MILLENNIUM
243
Notes
263
Index
291
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About the author (2004)

James S. Olson is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the history department at Sam Houston State University. He is co-author (with Randy Roberts) of both Winning Is the Only Thing: Sports in America since 1945, available from Johns Hopkins, and John Wayne: American.

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