In June 1733 Elizabeth Cary and her husband Mordecai Cary, the bishop of Clonfert, were distressed. The Bishop wrote to consult his friend Dr Jurin in London about Mrs Cary's curious symptoms that had emerged a month earlier. She had caught cold being in newly built rooms ‘where the walls were damp, after a walk that had heated her’. Her thoughtlessness not only caused her a cold, he explained to Jurin, but her left breast became very painful. The pain radiated to her hands and hip, Cary noted and added in the upper index: ‘sometimes into her right breast & right armpit’. What added to the worries was that Mrs Cary had a history of serious breast problems. The very same breast had been lanced by the famous surgeon Chiselden sixteen years ago, around the time her son Henry Cary was born which would suggest that a milk abscess had been the cause of her earlier breast trouble. Since breast cancer was customarily understood to have a long history and its roots often in blows, bruises or illnesses suffered many years earlier, it is understandable that the Carys now worried about her symptoms. When her troubles grew worse, his fear in his second letter to Jurin a week and a half later is tangible: ‘Pray, Dr, is there reason to fear a Cancer? and if it should prove a Cancer, what must we do?’

Cancer in the breast caused formidable emotional turmoil in persons who were suspected to have it or were diagnosed with it, and it was frightful to everyone.