Remembering Betty Rollin, Who Told Her Breast Surgeon That Post-Operative Appearance Mattered
Women who had undergone disfiguring surgery for breast cancer, according to one surgeon in the 1970s, needed to “stick an old sock in their bra and get on with their lives.” It was this climate that Betty Rollin, then a television correspondent for NBC, entered when she was diagnosed with the disease in 1975. Rollin, […]
The Trailblazer Who Ensured Women With Breast Cancer Had a Choice
Today, it is not uncommon when a woman diagnosed with breast cancer writes about her experiences. Illness memoirs, hardly only about breast cancer, are now a popular genre. However, this was not always the case. When New York City-based writer Babette Rosmond published her book The Invisible Worm 50 years ago, it was a daring act of […]
The Trap of Treatment Dogma
New research showing that certain women with early-stage breast cancer may be able to skip chemotherapy has created understandable excitement: Avoiding the side effects of chemotherapy without compromising one’s prognosis is highly appealing for women diagnosed with this difficult disease. Interestingly, such an approach would have been of little surprise to a group of largely […]
John Bailar’s Righteous Attack on the “War on Cancer”
When then-President Richard Nixon launched the “war on cancer” in 1971, there was no more admirable cause to support. The dreaded disease was the second leading cause of death that year for Americans, after heart disease, and has maintained that spot for decades. Yet John C. Bailar III, a physician and epidemiologist who died in […]