Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer, and History

by James S. Olson and James Stuart Olson

Book Overview

The stories of women throughout the ages who have confronted breast cancer, from ancient times to the present.

A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2003 and Winner of the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for the History of Science

Breast cancer may very well be history's oldest malaise, known as well to the ancients as it is to us. The women who have endured it share a unique sisterhood...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801869366
• ISBN13: 9780801869365
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.2" x 9.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Breast Cancer from 480 B.C.E. to present day

This was a well written book which followed many personal stories of women through out history and their battle with cancer. It is a history book but was written dramatically and keeps the reader interested. It covers almost every topic concerning women and breast cancer. The only complaint is that the second half of the book is based more on the politics and legislation of breast cancer which becomes slightly repetitive and boring.

A Must Read for Everyone Affected by Breast Cancer

As a metastatic breast cancer patient, I found this book to be enormously enlightening. For the first time, I feel as though I really understand this disease and how we've gotten to this point in time in terms of prevailing attitudes, available treatments, doctor-patient relationships, and overall prognosis. Although it's a history lesson, this book has also served to give me a new perspective for evaluating my own personal options. I feel empowered by the information in these pages. It points out how deadly serious breast cancer is, even though some would have us believe otherwise. I recommend this book for everyone who is affected by breast cancer (which should be practically everyone).

A sensitive,multi-faceted and comprehensive look at breast cancer

James Olson is to be commended for writing this much needed history of breast cancer for the layman. My husband is a radiologist beginning a fellowship in breast imaging. He discovered this fascinating book and when he was finished I asked him to give it to me. Like the previous reviewer, I couldn't put it down. I don't have breast cancer, but I am of the age when many of my peers have developed this frightening disease. Olson is realistic, empathetic, and well informed. My favorite line came from former child star Shirley Temple Black who, rather than have a biopsy turn into a radical mastecomy, responded to the press by saying, "The surgeon will make the incision. I will make the decision." You can't read this book without having enormous respect for the women who did their own research, asked the right questions, and took on the conventional wisdom and arrogance of male physicians. At the same time, Olson is brutal on the hucksters and frauds who attempt to explain away cancer with psychobabble and unproveable theories. Bathseba's Breast is not an optimistic book, but it can be reassuring that slow, steady progress is being made in the battle against breast cancer.

Fighting with Hope Against Breast Cancer

Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer & History by James Olson is a far-reaching examination of the dreaded disease of breast cancer. Impressive for its scope of historical, medical, political and personal references, the book transcends its obvious historical imperative by including much about living with hope in the face of adversity as well as dying without surrendering to the evil disease.A cancer diagnosis today is not necessarily a death sentence. Olson explains how breast cancer has threatened all women, regardless of demography, since at least the time of the pharaohs and probably since creation of the species. The fifth of Olson's 11 carefully referenced chapters inaugurates the book's evolution of Hope for breast cancer sufferers, signaling with its title, "New Beginnings: Assault on the Radical Mastectomy." Make no mistake, neither the chapter nor the book reveal the silver bullet that will conquer breast cancer. However, from this point forward, Bathsheba's Breast explains how medical science has made progress against the disease - sometimes despite itself - and how that progress appeared to be accelerating at the end of the 20th century, albeit in tortuously slow steps for those fighting the disease. Increasingly credible optimism emerges as Olson explains the evolution of medicine's knowledge and attitudes about breast cancer, the birth of breast cancer patient advocacy and the growing arsenal of weapons that medical researchers, physicians and patients are bringing to the fight.Olson is comprehensive, well organized and even entertaining in an appropriate tone for such a serious topic as he gives us the history, evolution and status of the war against breast cancer. Bathsheba's Breast is suitable for all readers, regardless of gender, ethnicity, age or health. Its appeal to such a broad audience lies mainly in the mature tone and integrated style with which Olson approaches all aspects of the subject. It's also because he's deciphered cancer's jargon of "omas" and "ectomies" so they're understandable, both in definition and in context. Readers will be pleased how smoothly he combines history, complicated medical research, political science and public opinion with the personal stories of patients to produce a compelling read. Faithful to the historigraphical method, the book ventures 3,500 years back to an Egyptian surgeon who wrote about "bulging tumors" in the breast for which "There is no treatment." Olson tells how Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, studied the nature and cause of cancer, attributing its cause to "black bile," one of his four theoretical fluids of the body: blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile. The book develops a special character as it links these ancients to women of subsequent history who suffered from breast cancer. We learn about victims like Theodora, wife of Justinian, the emperor of Byzantium in the sixth century, Anne of Austria, the mother of Louis XIV in the 17th century, George

An Excellent Blend of History and Medicine

My husband purchased this book for me after he heard the author on NPR. I could not put it down. The author's approach to looking at breast cancer over time, the changes in treatment options, and how accidental findings changed the course of medical treatment over time was illuminating. The book also raises the spectre as to how much of breast cancer treatment advances, or lack of, were the result of this being primarily but not exclusively a female disease. I do not have a formal medical background, so I was a little leary that it would be too technical. But instead, I found it to be highly readable and engaging. It also sends a strong message that from the beginning of time breast cancer held no one harmless. And in many ways, the key to the advances have come from patients taking their health destiny into their own hands and not simply accepting a physician's treatment recommendation. Certainly sheds light on the more recent discussions about the value of mammography as a diagnostic tool. Well worth reading!!