Ebook497 pages8 hours
Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer, and History
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
An absorbing and unsettling history of breast cancer told through the stories of women who have confronted it from ancient times to the present.
A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year
In 1967, an Italian surgeon touring Amsterdam’s Rijks museum stopped in front of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath and noticed an asymmetry to Bathsheba’s left breast; it seemed distended, swollen near the armpit, discolored, and marked with a distinctive pitting. The physician learned that Rembrandt’s model, Hendrickje Stoffels, later died after a long illness. He conjectured that the cause of her death was almost certainly breast cancer.
In Bathsheba’s Breast, James S. Olson traces the history of breast cancer through women’s experiences of the disease across epochs and continents. The stories range from the sixth-century Byzantine empress Theodora, who chose to die rather than lose her breast to Dr. Jerri Nielson, 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 has dictated the terms of a war on a “woman’s disease”; and the rise of patient activism.
“An invaluable aid to those breast cancer survivors with an interest in taking the long view of their illness.” —Nick Owchar Los Angeles Times
A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year
In 1967, an Italian surgeon touring Amsterdam’s Rijks museum stopped in front of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath and noticed an asymmetry to Bathsheba’s left breast; it seemed distended, swollen near the armpit, discolored, and marked with a distinctive pitting. The physician learned that Rembrandt’s model, Hendrickje Stoffels, later died after a long illness. He conjectured that the cause of her death was almost certainly breast cancer.
In Bathsheba’s Breast, James S. Olson traces the history of breast cancer through women’s experiences of the disease across epochs and continents. The stories range from the sixth-century Byzantine empress Theodora, who chose to die rather than lose her breast to Dr. Jerri Nielson, 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 has dictated the terms of a war on a “woman’s disease”; and the rise of patient activism.
“An invaluable aid to those breast cancer survivors with an interest in taking the long view of their illness.” —Nick Owchar Los Angeles Times
Author
James S. Olson
James S. Olson is an academic and the Pulitzer Prize–nominated author of over thirty books.
Read more from James S. Olson
John Wayne: American: American Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ethnic Dimension in American History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhere the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945 - 2010 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Bathsheba's Breast
Related ebooks
Prescription for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWomen of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Times and Tides of Tuberculosis: Perceptions Revealed in Literature, Keats to Sontag Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Dance Manias of The Middle Ages Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA History of Women's Lives in Hove and Portslade Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTubercular Capital: Illness and the Conditions of Modern Jewish Writing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Caryl Churchill's "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAndrea's Voice: Silenced by Bulimia: Her Story and Her Mother's Journey Through Grief Toward Understanding Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Danger, Darkness and Destitution in Nineteenth Century Britain Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVirginia Woolf: And the Women Who Shaped Her World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Women Jefferson Loved Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Fever Bark Tree: The Pageant of Quinine Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Want of Kindness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLady Byron Vindicated Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Female Academy: 'I will put my Daughter therein to be instructed'' Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Trial of Gustav Graef: Art, Sex, and Scandal in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAbortion Pills Go Global: Reproductive Freedom across Borders Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGood Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLoimologia: Or, an Historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665 With Precautionary Directions Against the Like Contagion Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Great Pestilence Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Epidemics of the Middle Ages: The Black Death, The Dancing Mania & The Sweating Sickness Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown's Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Essentials of Autopsy Practice: Reviews, Updates and Advances Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUseful Bodies: Humans in the Service of Medical Science in the Twentieth Century Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the "Ethnic Revolution" in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936–1946 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Devil's Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
History For You
The Secret History of the World Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Library Book Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Grief Observed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5100 Things You're Not Supposed to Know: Secrets, Conspiracies, Cover Ups, and Absurdities Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Richest Man in Babylon: The most inspiring book on wealth ever written Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Whore Stories: A Revealing History of the World's Oldest Profession Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Great Reset: And the War for the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters--And How to Get It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Awakening: Defeating the Globalists and Launching the Next Great Renaissance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lessons of History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Bathsheba's Breast
Rating: 3.625 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
8 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Bathsheba's Breast - James S. Olson
jd book_preview_excerpt.html }]V_c7DJ)4lֈMY؇[*Q@ @u4v^'O{2{&wcV.͏'&n}Ͱ?P?cZhkSA[J~_LJ բn\~W,j~]yQn߯۲Wᲆt>6V\>^nUU|^<]<:W=;{Vմ]I_;O6MŻzlb'_>:egOOo=~vW?>z'Y.Ǐ={+͞G>?{Zny{d;Uv}gB݄%껭y6I~J}u\XUtYb[caN_<9h1{R*De^mwhbOJ5X\\}ssS~u_;].xbO} ono)x(4o˫_o+W7.߽y?;/~[f<@9h!