Bathsheba's breast : women, cancer & history / James S. Olson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Olson, James Stuart, 1946-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Breast--Cancer--History.

Breast.

Breast--Cancer.

History.

Physical Description:

x, 302 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Summary:

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, from ancient Egypt to Dr. Jerri Nielson, who was dramatically evacuated from the South Pole in 1999 after performing a biopsy on her own breast.

Contents:

Prologue: Across Time 1

1. Dark Ages 9

2. "Unkindest Cut of All": The Origins of the Mastectomy 27

3. William Stewart Halsted and the Radical Mastectomy 45

4. Superradicals and the Medicine of Mutilation 65

5. New Beginnings: Assault on the Radical Mastectomy 86

6. Beauty and the Breast: The Great American Obsession 100

7. Out of the Closet: Breast Cancer in the 1970s 124

8. Patient Heal Thyself: Quacks and Cures in the Age of Narcissism 145

9. Choices: Medical Treatment in the Age of Liberation 171

10. The Breast Cancer Wars 192

11. Biology, Society, and Destiny 221

Epilogue: The New Millennium 243.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [263]-289) and index.

ISBN:

0801869366

OCLC:

48163235