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A Darker Ribbon : A Twentieth-Century Story of Breast Cancer, Women, and Their Doctors
A Darker Ribbon A TwentiethCentury Story of Breast Cancer Women and Their Doctors Author:Ellen Leopold "A fascinating cultural history of breast cancer."* This first cultural history of the social attitudes and treatments surrounding breast cancer in the past century powerfully examines the relationship between women and their doctors. At the heart of the book are two unpublished correspondences-one between Barbara Mueller, a woman diagnosed wit... more »h breast cancer eighty years ago, and her surgeon, William Steward Halsted, father of the radical mastectomy, and the other between Rachel Carson, who was writing Silent Spring as she was battling breast cancer, and her personal physician George Crile, Jr. "Why did it take most of the twentieth century for breast cancer to move from being viewed as a disease that affected women to a woman's disease? How do we explain the stubborn reluctance of American women to understand breast cancer as a feminist issue? Leopold's answers to these questions, along with her skillful attempt to fill a historiographical void in the breast cancer literature, make for engaging reading."*Regina Morantz-Sanchez, The Women's Review of Books "The apposition of Barbara Mueller's interaction with Halsted and Rachel Carson's with Crile is compelling and poignant."Jerome Groopman, The New York Times Book Review "I would recommend [this book] to anyone . . . as a truly engaged social history of a curious, melancholy, and, until now, untold chapter in medical history."Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe« less