Bathsheba's breast
Subtitle: women, cancer & history
By: James S. Olson
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 302
ISBN-13: 9780801869365
Subjects: Cancer; Brustkrebs; Histoire; Breast Neoplasms; Geschichte; Borstkanker; History; Mastectomy; Sein; Breast
Description: In 1967, an Italian surgeon touring Amsterdam's Rijks museum stopped in front of Rembrandt's Bathsheba at the Well, 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 this book, historian James S. Olson 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [263]-289) and index.
Table of contents: title: Preface; title: Acknowledgments; title: Prologue : across time; title: Dark ages; title: Unkindest cut of all : the origins of the mastectomy; title: William Stewart Halsted and the radical mastectomy; title: Superradicals and the medicine of mutilation; title: New beginnings : assault on the radical mastectomy; title: Beauty and the breast : the great American obsession; title: Out of the closet : breast cancer in the 1970s; title: Patient heal thyself : quacks and cures in the age of narcissism; title: Choices : medical treatment in the age of liberation; title: Breast cancer wars; title: Biology, society, and destiny; title: Epilogue : the new millenium.