Inventing a Curable Disease: Historical Perspectives on Breast Cancer

Abstract

Perhaps the most contentious issue in the history of cancer therapy is the radical mastectomy. During the first half of the twentieth century, this operation came to exemplify what “scientific surgery” could achieve in the treatment of both breast and other cancers. Yet, by the 1970s, feminist critics assailed radical mastectomy as a needlessly disfiguring operation that male surgeons were unwilling to abandon. As such, it exemplified a central theme in the critique of twentieth-century medicine: the powerless patient as a victim of the well-meaning but imperious physician.

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