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Women, Cancer, and History
Johns Hopkins University Press
February 2005
On Sale: February 9, 2005
320 pages ISBN: 0801880645 EAN: 9780801880643 Paperback
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Self-Help Health
"Breast cancer may very well be history's oldest malaise,
known as well to the ancients as it is to us. The women who
have endured it share a unique sisterhood. Queen Atossa and
Dr. Jerri Nielsen -- separated by era and geography, by
culture, religion, politics, economics, and world view --
could hardly have been more different. Born 2,500 years
apart, they stand as opposite bookends on the shelf of human
history. One was the most powerful woman in the ancient
world, the daughter of an emperor, the mother of a god; the
other is a twenty-first-century physician with a streak of
adventure coursing through her veins. From the imperial
throne in ancient Babylon, Atossa could not have imagined
the modern world, and only in the driest pages of classical
literature could Antarctica-based Jerri Nielsen even have
begun to fathom the Near East five centuries before the
birth of Christ. For all their differences, however, they
shared a common fear that transcends time and space." --
from Bathsheba's Breast In 1967, an Italian surgeon
touring Amsterdam's Rijks museum stopped in front of
Rembrandt's Bathsheba at Her Bath, on loan from the Louvre,
and noticed an asymmetry to Bathsheba's left breast; it
seemed distended, swollen near the armpit, discolored, and
marked with a distinctive pitting. With a little research,
the physician learned that Rembrandt's model, his mistress
Hendrickje Stoffels, later died after a long illness, and he
conjectured in a celebrated article for an Italian medical
journal that the cause of her death was almost certainly
breast cancer. A horror known to every culture in
every age, breast cancer has been responsible for the deaths
of 25 million women throughout history. An Egyptian
physician writing 3,500 years ago concluded that there was
no treatment for the disease. Later surgeons recommended
excising the tumor or, in extreme cases, the entire breast.
This was the treatment advocated by the court physician to
sixth-century Byzantine empress Theodora, the wife of
Justinian, though she chose to die in pain rather than lose
her breast. Only in the past few decades has treatment
advanced beyond disfiguring surgery. In Bathsheba's
Breast, historian James S. Olson -- who lost his left hand
and forearm to cancer while writing this book -- provides an
absorbing and often frightening narrative history of breast
cancer told through the heroic stories of women who have
confronted the disease, from Theodora to Anne of Austria,
Louis XIV's mother, who confronted "nun's disease" by
perfecting the art of dying well, to Dr. Jerri Nielson, who
was dramatically 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. Olson
concludes that, although it has not yet been conquered,
breast cancer is no longer the story of individual women
struggling alone against a mysterious and deadly foe.
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