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A pathology of progress? Locating the historiography of cancer

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Emm BarnesJohnstonewithJoannaBaines, The Changing Faces of Childhood Cancer: Clinical and Cultural Visions since 1940. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. xiii + 236. ISBN 978-1-4039-8801-0. £63.00 (hardback).
AlannaSkuse, Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England: Ravenous Natures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. viii + 219. ISBN 978-1-137-48752-0. £20.00 (hardback).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2016

Agnes Arnold-Forster
Agnes Arnold-Forster*
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Extract

Despite its prominent position in today's medical research, popular culture and everyday life, cancer's history is relatively unwritten. Compared to the other great ‘plagues’ – cholera, tuberculosis or tropical fevers, to name but a scant handful – cancer has few dedicated pages in the general surveys, and its specialists have largely failed to convince the broader community of medical historians – or indeed historians of anything at all – that histories of the disease can tell us fundamental things about the science and practice of medicine, both past and present. Moreover, cancer has a remarkably stable profile over time, at least in terms of its definition, language and terminology – a detail that only makes the disease's absence from historical literature more surprising.

Type
Essay Review
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 49 , Special Issue 4: Owning Health: Medicine and Anglo-American Patent Cultures , December 2016 , pp. 627 - 634
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2016 

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References

1 Lerner, Barron H., The Breast Cancer Wards: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 Google Scholar.

2 For the former see Siddhartha Mukherjee's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, London: Fourth Estate, 2011 Google Scholar; Olson, James Stuart, Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer & History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002 Google Scholar. Two compelling examples of histories of the twentieth century are Cantor, David (ed.), Cancer in the Twentieth Century, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008 Google Scholar; and Timmermann, Carsten, A History of Lung Cancer: The Recalcitrant Disease, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Dun, Hugh P., ‘An inquiry into the causes of the increase of cancer’, British Medical Journal (1883) 1, pp. 708–710 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 This fits with what Michael Roper has written on the need for historians to confront the impacts of their own subjectivities on their work. Roper, Michael, ‘Slipping out of view: subjectivity and emotion in gender history’, History Workshop Journal (2005) 59, pp. 57–72 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roper, , ‘The unconscious work of history’, Cultural and Social History (2014) 11, pp. 169–193 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 A selection of recent work on the sensory experience of scientific practice: Berkowitz, Carin, ‘Charles Bell's seeing hand: teaching anatomy to the senses in Britain, 1750–1840’, History of Science (2014) 52, pp. 377–400 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bynum, W.F. and Porter, Roy, Medicine and the Five Senses, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 Google Scholar; Jenner, Mark, ‘Tasting Lichfield, touching China: Sir John Floyer's senses’, Historical Journal (2010) 53, pp. 647–670 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schlick, Thomas, ‘Why were surgical gloves not used earlier? Histories of medicine and alternative paths of innovation’, The Lancet (2015) 386, pp. 1234–1235 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weisser, Olivia, ‘Boils, pushes and wheals: reading bumps on the body in early modern England’, Social History of Medicine (2009) 22, pp. 321–339 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.