Bathsheba’s Breast: Women, Cancer, and History

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 Bathsheba’s Breast, 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 throughout the ages in order to explore 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.