A Woman’s Disease: The History of Cervical Cancer

231 Pages·2011·1.377 MB·English

by  Ilana Lowy

a woman’s disease
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A WOMAN’S
DISEASE
The History of Cervical Cancer
R
I lana L öwy
1
3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox26dp
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© Ilana Löwy 2011
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First published 2011
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ISBN 978–0–19–954881–1
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
contents
Acknowledgements v ii
Prologue: Three Patients 1
1 The Early History of Tumours of the Womb 1 7
2 S urgical Cures for a Cancerous Uterus 3 5
3 The Hope of Rays 5 3
4 The Pap Smear 7 9
5 Save the Women 1 07
6 Cervical Cancer Becomes a Sexually Transmitted
Disease 1 29
7 Still a Woman’s Scourge 1 55
Epilogue: Cervical Cancer in the Twenty-First
Century 1 77
Glossary 1 83
Notes 1 89
Further Reading 2 05
Index 215
v
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acknowledgements
I’m very grateful to Helen and Bill Bynum for persuading me
to write this book, “forcing” me to venture into unknown ter-
ritories and to learn many new things, and providing unfailing
encouragement and support. I am as always thankful to my
home institution, INSERM, the French Institute of Health and
Medical Research, which has afforded continual support for
my atypical investigations, and to my research center, CERMES
3, which provides excellent intellectual and material condi-
tions for my work, as well as rich possibilities for confronting
my ideas with those of other scholars studying intersections
between science, medicine and society.
This study benefi ted greatly from exchanges with many col-
leagues, from the rapidly growing though unoffi cial history
of cancer network. Thanks to all the participants in the con-
ferences on cancer history in Washington, Manchester, and
Paris, and to scholars who made these conferences possible:
Isabelle Baszanger David Cantor, John Pickstone and Carsten
Timmermann. Special thanks to Robert Aronowitz, Yolanda
Eraso, Ornella Mosccuci and Elisabeth Toon, who generously
shared with me their knowledge of the history of cervical cancer.
vii
acknowledgements
In Brazil, Luiz Antonio Teixeira helped me to understand the
specifi city of efforts to prevent cervical cancer in that country,
and Claudia Bonan, Marilena Correa, Andrea Loyola and Katia
da Silva taught me about problems of women’s reproductive
health in a developing country.
S ome of the material in this book draws on my own origi-
nal research published in an earlier book P reventive Strikes (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2009) and the following articles:
• Ilana Löwy, ‘Cancer, women and public health: the
history of screening for cervical cancer’, Manguinhos ,
2010, 17 (supl. 1): 53-67.
• Luiz Antonio Teixiera and Ilana Löwy, ‘Imperfect tools
for a diffi cult job: Colposcopy, ‘colpocytology’ and
screening for cervical cancer in Brazil’, Social Studies of
Medicine , in press.
• Ilana Löwy, ‘ “Because of Their Praiseworthy Modesty,
They Consult Too Late”: Regime of Hope and Cancer of
the Womb, 1800–1910’, B ulletin of the History of Medicine ,
2011, 85-356-383.
I’m grateful to Latha Menon at the Oxford University Press
for her support for this project, to Emma Marchant for her
highly effi cient help in bringing this volume to press, to Nick
Prowse for careful copy editing of the manuscript, and to Fiona
Vlemmiks for dealing with the fi nal stage of production.
T hanks to my extended family for being there for me when
needed, a permanent intellectual stimulation , and for putting
my (hopefully mild) obsessions into perspective.
D uring the writing of this book I prematurely lost two
close colleagues and friends: Olga Amsterdamska, who died
in August, 2009, and Harry Marks, who died in January, 2011.
Their high intellectual standards, sharp but always positive
viii
acknowledgements
criticism, and their unfailing support, sustained my scholar-
ship. In the last stages of the production of this book I repeat-
edly found myself thinking that I should ask Olga and/or
Harry to help me to clarify this or that point—then realized
with a pang the extent of the loss, for me and for our scholarly
communities.
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