Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer, and History Book

In 1967, an Italian surgeon touring Amsterdam stopped in front of Rembrandt's "Bathsheba at Her Bath," 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 research, the physician learned Rembrandt's model, his mistress later died. He conjectured in a celebrated medical article the death was due to breast cancer, which has been responsible for the deaths of 25 million women. 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 Olson-who lost his left hand to cancer while writing it-provides an absorbing narrative history of breast cancer told through heroic stories of women who confronted it, from Theodora, Anne of Austria (Louis XIV's mother, she confronted "nun's disease" by perfecting the art of dying well), and Abigail "Nabby" Adams (only daughter of President John Adams, who ministered to his dying daughter after her mastectomy failed to cure her cancer) to Rachel Carson, Betty Ford, and Dr. ]erri Nielsen, who was 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 dictated the terms of a war on a "woman's disease." Olson concludes breast cancer has finally lost the stigma that prevented people from sharing experiences of it.Read More