One Saturday in June 2000, a small crowd gathered on the grounds of the University of Cincinnati (UC) Medical Center. They congregated around a plaque that had been placed a few months prior as a ceremonial end to years of litigation. Among the crowd was the case’s presiding judge, Sandra Beckwith of the Southern District… Read more →
Tag: cancer
The Spaces of Screening: Tracing the Spatial Geographies of Mobile Mammography from Carparks to the Cosmos
In 2019, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) launched a new cancer detection initiative. In this pilot program, the NHS harnessed “technology developed for space travel” to design a series of mobile cancer screening vans, which have been placed in Sainsbury’s and Morrisons supermarket parking lots across Great Britain (Figure 1). Designed by the UK space… Read more →
Fight Cancer like a Feminist
On May 2, 2018, I was coming out of anesthesia from an emergency appendectomy when I learned I might have cancer. After an excruciating five days in the hospital, my surgeon confirmed that I had moderately differentiated adenocarcinoma but was unsure as to the type of cancer. While it may sound cliché, my life quite… Read more →
Metaphors and Malignancy in Senator McCain’s Cancer Diagnosis
When my grandmother died from a mucosal melanoma (a form of skin cancer) in 2015, I sat around with my mother and my aunts talking through the wording of the email we were going to send round to her friends and colleagues to inform them of her death. We rejected the obvious line, “She died… Read more →
On Feeding My Husband with Cancer
I am both a historian of medicine and a practicing physician. This sometimes throws into sharp relief how different medicine is today than it was even 100 years ago. One of the guiding principles in my research and teaching is called “relativism” — trying to understand people and ideas in the past on their own… Read more →
Is Your Doctor Experimenting On You?
My friend’s father is in the hospital, and it’s been rough. His cancer treatment did not go as expected. “He’s suffering so much!” my friend sighed. “And the doctors, they’re just experimenting on him. It’s horrible.” When I heard this, I was confused. Was her father in some sort of experimental treatment? “No. But the… Read more →