| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Barron H. Lerner. The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. xvi, 381. $30.00.

This book by Barron H. Lerner is a fabulous resource for understanding the context of the ongoing, heated debates about breast cancer detection and treatment. It is medical history at its best, a timely study that helps readers sort out the subject of breast cancer politics, historically and today. 1

Lerner demonstrates in clear, accessible language that "disease cannot be understood outside its social and cultural context" (p. 5). He finds that, throughout the twentieth century, breast cancer control focused on two major themes: early detection and treatment through radical surgery. Much of his study documents the rise and decline of the radical mastectomy, the surgical solution to breast cancer created by Dr. William Halstead of Johns Hopkins University in the early twentieth century. Halstead set the pattern for breast cancer control in the twentieth century with the message, "Get here soon enough and we can cure you" (p. 291). Cancer control, with a "search and destroy" mindset, led to the identification of ever smaller cancers, since the 1950s through breast self-examination and since the 1970s with the use of mammography. . . .

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