Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T05:07:46.205Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A pathology of progress? Locating the historiography of cancer

Review products

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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.