Cervical cancer is one of the world’s most preventable cancers. And yet, every year, it continues to kill more than 340,000 women around the globe. Its rampage shows no sign of abating. Recent developments in medical science have given us the means of eliminating this cancer, including an HPV vaccine with a record for preventing up to 90 percent of cervical cancer, increasingly effective screening tests for detecting it as pre-cancer, and – should cervical pre-cancer progress to cancer – sophisticated treatment methods for extending and even sparing lives. But the vast majority of lower-income countries and regions within higher-income countries either know little about this cancer or lack the resources or infrastructure to stop it. Without greater awareness and a global willingness to intervene, hundreds of thousands more persons with cervixes will die. It will require a passionate, sustained, collective effort to save them.

Chapter 6: This chapter discusses how, as scientific medicine gained ascendancy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, theatre became an important site for the examination of scientific medicine’s aspirations, achievements, limitations, and dangers. Early twentieth-century plays celebrated the pioneers of modern disease research and their accomplishments, while later twentieth- and early twenty-first century plays display a growing critique of scientific medicine and its conception of the body as an object of medical knowledge. David Feldshuh’s Miss Evers’ Boys considers the human and ethical stakes of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus addresses the historical objectification of anomalous bodies. Margaret Edson’s Wit, given extensive discussion here, explores the conflict between scientism and subjectivity in the context of the modern research hospital. The medium of theatre is central to these dramatic critiques; medical science may formulate the human body as an object of knowledge, but theatre’s bodies look back in the midst of their display.