Gender and Cancer in England, 1860-1948

Gender and Cancer in England, 1860-1948
Author: Ornella Moscucci
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2017-01-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1349601098

This volume focuses on gynaecological cancer to explore the ways in which gender has shaped medical and public health responses to cancer in England. Rooted in gendered perceptions of cancer risk, medical and public health efforts to reduce cancer mortality since 1900 have prominently targeted women’s cancers. Women have also been key participants in the ‘war’ on cancer through their various roles as medical practitioners, midwives, nurses, health visitors, radiotherapists and cytotechnicians. Moscucci’s study traces this complex history from the establishment of ‘early detection and treatment’ policies aimed at cervical cancer, to the controversial development of prophylactic oophorectomy as a strategy for the prevention of ovarian cancer. Women’s cancers are highly visible in modern English society as symbols of progress in cancer therapy and prevention. The account offered in this volume reveals a different story, marked by hopes and fears, expectations and disappointments.

Belly-Rippers, Surgical Innovation and the Ovariotomy Controversy

Belly-Rippers, Surgical Innovation and the Ovariotomy Controversy
Author: Sally Frampton
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2018-12-30
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3319789341

This open access book looks at the dramatic history of ovariotomy, an operation to remove ovarian tumours first practiced in the early nineteenth century. Bold and daring, surgeons who performed it claimed to be initiating a new era of surgery by opening the abdomen. Ovariotomy soon occupied a complex position within medicine and society, as an operation which symbolised surgical progress, while also remaining at the boundaries of ethical acceptability. This book traces the operation’s innovation, from its roots in eighteenth-century pathology, through the denouncement of those who performed it as ‘belly-rippers’, to its rapid uptake in the 1880s, when ovariotomists were accused of over-operating. Throughout the century, the operation was never a hair’s breadth from controversy.

Globalism and Gendering Cancer

Globalism and Gendering Cancer
Author: Miriam O'Kane Mara
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2019-11-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0429516533

This book connects a rhetorical examination of medical and public health policy documents with a humanistic investigation of cultural texts to uncover the link between gendered representations of health and cancer. The author argues that in western biomedical contexts cancer is considered a women’s disease and their bodies are treated as inherently oncogenic or cancer-producing, which leads to biomedical practices that adversely impact their bodily autonomy. She examines how these biases traverse national boundaries by examining the transmission of biomedical cancer practices from the US and international organizations to Kenya. This book is suited to scholars and students working in the fields of Rhetorics of Health and Medicine, Medical Humanities and Gender Studies. It is also of interest to medical professionals and readers interested in globalism and global health.

The Cancer Problem

The Cancer Problem
Author: Agnes Arnold-Forster
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2022-01-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192635751

The Cancer Problem offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding the Middlesex Hospital in London. It follows in their footsteps as they walked the labyrinthine lanes and passages that branched off Tottenham Court Road; then, through seven chapters, its focus expands to successively include the rivers, lakes, and forests of England, the mountains, poverty, and hunger of the four nations of the British Isles, the reluctant and resistant inhabitants of the British Empire, and the networks of scientists and doctors spread across Europe and North America. The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain argues that it was in the nineteenth century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease's incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present.

Proteins, Pathologies and Politics

Proteins, Pathologies and Politics
Author: David Gentilcore
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2018-12-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1350056871

Proteins, Pathologies and Politics presents an international and historical approach to dietary change and health, contrasting current concerns with how issues such as diabetes, cancer, vitamins, sugar and fat, and food allergies were perceived in the 19th and 20th centuries. Though what we eat and what we shouldn't eat has become a topic of increased scrutiny in the current century, the link between dietary innovation and health/disease is not a new one. From new fads in foodstuffs, through developments in manufacturing and production processes, to the inclusion of additives and evolving agricultural practices changing diet, changes often promised better health only to become associated with the opposite. With contributors including Peter Scholliers, Francesco Buscemi, Clare Gordon Bettencourt, and Kirsten Gardner, this collection comprises the best scholarship on how we have perceived diet to affect health. The chapters consider: - the politics and economics of dietary change - the historical actors involved in dietary innovation and the responses to it - the extent that our dietary health itself a cultural construct, or even a product of history This is a fascinating and varied study of how our diets have been shaped and influenced by perceptions of health and will be of great value to students of history, food history, nutrition science, politics and sociology.

Progress and pathology

Progress and pathology
Author: Sally Shuttleworth
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2020-01-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1526133709

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This collaborative volume explores changing perceptions of health and disease in the context of the burgeoning global modernities of the nineteenth century. With case studies from Britain, America, France, Germany, Finland, Bengal, China and the South Pacific, it demonstrates how popular and medical understandings of the mind and body were reframed by the social, cultural and political structures of ‘modern life’. Essays within the collection examine ways in which cancer, suicide, and social degeneration were seen as products of the stresses and strains of ‘new’ ways of living. Others explore the legal, institutional, and intellectual changes that contributed to modern medical practice. The volume traces ways that physiological and psychological problems were being constituted in relation to each other, and to their social contexts, and offers new ways of contextualising the problems of modernity facing us in the twenty-first century.

Gender and Cancer in England, 1860-1948

Gender and Cancer in England, 1860-1948
Author: Ornella Moscucci
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-02-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780230554238

This volume focuses on gynaecological cancer to explore the ways in which gender has shaped medical and public health responses to cancer in England. Rooted in gendered perceptions of cancer risk, medical and public health efforts to reduce cancer mortality since 1900 have prominently targeted women’s cancers. Women have also been key participants in the ‘war’ on cancer through their various roles as medical practitioners, midwives, nurses, health visitors, radiotherapists and cytotechnicians. Moscucci’s study traces this complex history from the establishment of ‘early detection and treatment’ policies aimed at cervical cancer, to the controversial development of prophylactic oophorectomy as a strategy for the prevention of ovarian cancer. Women’s cancers are highly visible in modern English society as symbols of progress in cancer therapy and prevention. The account offered in this volume reveals a different story, marked by hopes and fears, expectations and disappointments.

The History of Cancer and Emotions in Twentieth-Century Germany

The History of Cancer and Emotions in Twentieth-Century Germany
Author: Bettina Hitzer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2022-06-30
Genre: Cancer
ISBN: 0192868071

Different people feel different emotions when they are diagnosed with cancer. Both today and a century ago, fear and hope, shame and disgust, sadness and joy are and were the emotions experienced by many cancer patients and their loved ones. But these emotions do not just have significance for the people who feel them. They have also exerted a surprisingly profound influence on how hospitals and laboratories dealt with cancer, how early detection campaigns portrayed it, and how doctors talked about it with their patients. Bettina Hitzer details the history of cancer and emotions in twentieth-century Germany and thus follows the cancer-associated transformations of emotional regimes, emotional politics, and emotional experiences through five different political systems. In doing so, the study underscores that political caesuras resonate in the immediate corporeality of the history of emotions.

The Promising Future of Public Health

The Promising Future of Public Health
Author: Irving I. Kessler
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2021-04-07
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1527568113

Epidemiology originated during the Middle Ages when science-based medicine arose and medical schools were established. Clinically trained epidemiologists began to advance knowledge on human disease through intensive observations of their patients over time. Modern computing was quickly adopted by epidemiologists as an essential tool of modern medicine. Despite its key role in medicine, epidemiology-based teaching and research is now faltering, as professors emphasize the difficulties, rather than the advantages, of this critical branch of medicine. No other medical specialty can accurately track diseases in populations at risk, or evaluate the cost and quality of medical care. It can create clinical information systems for practising physicians, assess health risks in large population groups and evaluate unique subgroups at risk of disease. A major lesson from the COVID-19 experience is that enhancing the work of medical epidemiologists is crucial to the future of public health and clinical medicine. How this goal can be achieved is the central theme of this volume.

Medical histories of Belgium

Medical histories of Belgium
Author: Joris Vandendriessche
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2021-11-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526156547

Medical histories of Belgium reshapes Belgian history of medicine by bringing together a new generation of scholars. Going beyond a chronological narrative, the book offers new insights by questioning classic themes of the history of medicine: physicians, institutions and the nation state. While retracing specific Belgian characteristics, it also engages with broader European developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Medical histories of Belgium will appeal to Historians of Belgium in various subfields, especially cultural history and political history and medical historians and medical practitioners seeking the historical context of their activities.