The Breast Cancer Wars

A narrative of the century-long struggle to defeat breast cancer, a story that reveals the dramatic changes not just in medicine, but the relation of doctors, patients and society at large.

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Focusing on the stories of key physicians and patients, this book tells the story of breast cancer in 20th century America. It begins with Dr William Halsted's development of the radical mastectomy, hailed as the great advance in the era of heroic surgical interventions; continues with the birth of the American Cancer Society and its 'war' on cancer in the midcentury; and reveals how newly energized and impassioned women, together with maverick doctors and researchers, began to question and finally to fight against the assumption that radical surgery should be the therapy of choice. With compelling portraits of doctors such as Halsted and Oliver Cope, the Boston surgeon who shocked the establishment by 'going public' with his doubts about mastectomy; and women such as Rose Kushner, who crusaded tirelessly to empower breast cancer patients, Barron Lerner shows how the breast cancer wars embody some of the most crucial issues in the history of modern medicine.