A darker ribbon : breast cancer, women, and their doctors in the twentieth century / Ellen Leopold.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Leopold, Ellen, 1944-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Breast--Cancer--History--20th century.

Breast.

Breast--Cancer.

History.

Breast--Cancer--Social aspects.

Physical Description:

xi, 334 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Boston, Mass. : Beacon Press, [1999]

Summary:

The twentieth century managed to bring killers like polio and smallpox to heel--but it has been no match for breast cancer. The time is right for this first history of the way social attitudes toward this elusive and too-often shaming disease have shaped the course of its treatment. In A Darker Ribbon, Ellen Leopold looks closely at the relationship between women and their doctors and shows how sexual politics only recently have transformed the interactions between breast cancer patient and physician.

At the heart of the book are two unpublished correspondences that dramatize the slow pace of change and the still-timely issues of patient disclosure, privacy, and informed consent. One is between a woman diagnosed with breast cancer eighty years ago and her surgeon, William Stewart Halsted, father of the radical mastectomy. The second features the letters of Rachel Carson, who was writing and defending her environmental classic Silent Spring as she was in the final stages of breast cancer. These letters are invaluable women's health history, and a poignant and inspirational record of Carson fighting her way out of the role of compliant patient to become instead an advocate for herself, her own "case manager" in the days before such a phrase had ever been coined.

A Darker Ribbon reminds us of how, for most of this century, the experience of breast cancer was not one that could be shared with anyone outside the family--and often not even with those within it (Rachel Carson called her condition "a private little hell"). And Leopold tells how--through the disclosures, very different in style, of Betty Ford, Audre Lorde, Nancy Reagan, and Diane Middlebrook, among others--breast cancer has become a disease that, almost unbelievably, can now be broadcast from any public platform. Leopold connects these individual experiences to broader changes in society--to the rise, in particular, of feminism and the women's health movements. She tells the story of the decline of the radical mastectomy and the rise of equally radical new procedures, including the reconstructive surgery known as the TRAM flap, that bring us no closer to a cure. Finally, Leopold makes a convincing case that early twentieth-century campaigns on behalf of self-detection and today's obsession with so-called lifestyle factors concerning breast cancer share a disturbing goal: to condition women to accept responsibility for a still-deadly disease.

Today there are new players at the fore of breast cancer treatment--the oncologist, the multinational pharmaceutical company, the plastic surgeon offering breast reconstruction--who have altered the treatment priorities facing women (and men) coping with the disease into the next century. For all women and families who must make this journey, A Darker Ribbon is powerful incentive for participation and change.

Contents:

1 The Prehistory of Breast Cancer 23

2 The Dominance of Surgery 45

3 "A Really Hideous Mutilation": The Radical Mastectomy in the Correspondence of a Breast Cancer Patient and her Surgeon, William Stewart Halsted, 1917-22 85

4 "A Private Little Hell": the Letters of Rachel Carson and Dr. George Crile, Jr., 1960-64 111

5 The Battle for the Breast 153

6 Breast Cancer within the History of the Women's Health Movements 188

7 From the Closet to the Commonplace, 1945-75 215

8 At the Close of the Century 243

The Last Word: Obituaries 275.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 317-327) and index.

ISBN:

0807065129

OCLC:

41278406