Gender and cancer in Britain, 1860-1910: The emergence of cancer as a public health concern

American Journal of Public Health

Volumn 95, Issue 8, 2005, Pages 1312-1321

  Moscucci, Ornella ^a  

^a LONDON SCHOOL OF HYGIENE AND TROPICAL MEDICINE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CANCER; GENDER; HEALTH SERVICE; HISTORY OF MEDICINE; HUMAN; PUBLIC HEALTH; REVIEW; UNITED KINGDOM; UTERINE CERVIX CANCER;

FEMALE; GREAT BRITAIN; GYNECOLOGIC SURGICAL PROCEDURES; GYNECOLOGY; HEALTH PROMOTION; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; MALE; NEOPLASMS; PUBLIC HEALTH; SEX DISTRIBUTION; SOCIOLOGY, MEDICAL; UTERINE CERVICAL NEOPLASMS;

EID: 23044465204     PISSN: 00900036     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2004.046458     Document Type: Review

References (98)

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18. Ibid., The Nature and Treatment of Cancer 95.
19. Ibid., The Nature and Treatment of Cancer 94-95.
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28. Copland, Dictionary, 285.
29. Walshe, Nature and Treatment of Cancer, 192.
30. See, for example, West, Lectures on the Diseases of Women.
31. Quoted in Fleetwood Churchill, On the Diseases of Women; Including Those of Pregnancy and Childbed (Dublin: Fannin and Co, 1852), 327.
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34. Churchill, On the Diseases of Women, 329.
35. N. D. Jewson, "The Disappearance of the Sick-Man From Medical Cosmology," Sociology 10 (1976): 225-244.
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38. Moore, Antecedents of Cancer,
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40. Waller, "Illusion of an Explanation."
41. David Cantor makes this important point in "Cancer," in Dictionnaire de la pensée médicale, ed. Dominique Lecourt, François Delaporte, Patrice Pinell, and Christine Sinding (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004).
42. The question of heredity was also a prominent issue in debates about the etiology of tuberculosis. See Olby, "Constitutional and Hereditary Disorders"; Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 193-233.
43. Herbert Snow, Clinical Notes on Cancer: Its Etiology and Treatment With Special Reference to the Heredity-Fallacy, and to the Neurotic Origin of Most Cases of Alveolar Carcinoma (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1883), 22.
44. Percy H. Dunn, "Theory of Cancerous Inheritance," Lancet 1 (1886): 148-150, quotation from p. 148.
45. E. F. Bashford, "Heredity in Cancer," Lancet 2 (1908): 1508-1512, quotation from p. 1512.
46. Herbert Snow, "Heredity in Cancer [letter]," Lancet 1 (1898): 538.
47. Snow, Clinical Notes, 21;
48. see also Dunn, "Theory of Cancerous Inheritance."
49. William Japp Sinclair, "Malignant Diseases of the Uterus," in A System of Gynaecology, ed. Thomas Clifford Allbutt and W S. Playfair (London: Macmillan and Co, 1896), 643-743.
50. Ibid.,A System of Gynaecology, 658.
51. Alexander Theodore Brand, "The Etiology of Cancer," British Medical Journal 2 (1902): 238-42, quotation from p. 240.
52. Herbert Snow, The Proclivity of Women to Cancerous Diseases (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1891).
53. Brand, "Etiology of Cancer," 242;
54. Charles Plumley Childe, The Control of a Scourge, Or How Cancer is Curable (London: Methuen, 1906), 206.
55. Childe, Control of a Scourge, 225.
56. Virginia Sarah Smith, Cleanliness: The Development of Idea and Practice in Britain, 1770-1850 [PhD thesis] (London: London School of Economics, 1985).
57. M. Beverley, "Twenty Cases of Emmet's Operation for Laceration of Cervix Uteri," British Medical Journal 1 (1887): 109-110;
58. Frederick John McCann, The Treatment of Common Female Ailments (London: Edward Arnold, 1922), 42-43. By the end of the 20th century, the notion of prophylactic surgery had been extended to healthy, though potentially cancerous, organs such as the ovary, breast, and colon.
59. See, for example, Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830 (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).
60. Robert Darby, "'Where Doctors Differ': The Debate on Circumcision as a Protection Against Syphilis," Social History of Medicine 16 (2003): 57-78;
61. David L. Gollaher, "From Ritual to Science: The Medical Transformation of Circumcision in America," Journal of Social History 28 (1994): 5-36.
62. Quoted in Darby, "Where Doctors Differ," 64.
63. On the development of gynecological surgery, see Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
64. The question of radical surgery is examined by Gert H. Brieger, "From Conservative to Radical Surgery in Late Nineteenth-Century America," in Medical Theory, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery, ed. Christopher Lawrence (New York: Routledge, 1995), 216-231.
65. R. D. French, Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
66. On the feminist opposition to gynecological surgery, see Moscucci, Science of Woman, 158-160.
67. See, for example, Herbert Spencer, "A Discussion of the Measures to Be Recommended to Secure the Earlier Recognition of Uterine Cancer," British Medical Journal 2 (1907): 431-440.
68. Childe, Control of a Scourge, 67.
69. See, for example, Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990);
70. Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England (London: Croom Helm, 1980);
71. Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health From Ancient to Modem Times (New York: Routledge, 1999), 173-190.
72. Some health officials claimed that the rise was because of better diagnosis. See Arthur Newsholme, "The Statistics of Cancer," The Practitioner NS 9 (1899): 371-384.
73. For an illuminating discussion of the relationship between empire and chronic disease, see David Cantor, "Cortisone and the Politics of Empire: Imperialism and British Medicine, 1918-1955," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 67 (1993): 463-493.
74. See, for example, "A Biological View of the Cancer Cell [leading article]," British Medical Journal 2 (1911): 1494-1495.
75. "Cancer Curers," The Practitioner NS 9 (1899): 518-523.
76. See Austoker, History of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund,
77. Frank K. Prochaska, Philanthropy and the Hospitals of London: The King's Fund 1897-1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 116-117;
78. and the biographies of Julius Wernher, Alfred Beit, and Ernest Cassel in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
79. Spencer, "Discussion of the Measures," 431.
80. Snow, Clinical Notes, 50.
81. William Japp Sinclair, "Carcinoma in Women, Chiefly in Its Clinical Aspects," British Medical Journal 2 (1902): 321-327, quotation from p. 327.
82. Sinclair, "Malignant Diseases," 559-560.
83. On the sexual politics of gonorrhoea, see Michael Worboys, "Unsexing Gonorrhoea: Bacteriologists, Gynaecologists, and Suffragists in Britain, 1860-1920," Social History of Medicine 17 (2004): 41-59.
84. Sinclair, "Malignant Diseases," 661.
85. Sinclair, "Carcinoma in Women," 326.
86. I b i d.
87. Spencer, "Discussion of the Measures," 432.
88. Not all doctors agreed with this message, however. Some feared that it might induce unrealistic expectations of cure. See "The Public Appreciation of the Dangers and Treatment of Cancer [leading article]," Lancet 1 (1905): 39-40.
89. For a critique of the "delay" message, see Robert A. Aronowitz, "Do not Delay: Breast Cancer and Time, 1900-1970," Milbank Quarterly 79 (2001): 355-386.
90. "War Against Cancer [leading article]," British Medical Journal 1 (1904): 1448.
91. See, for example, Charles Plumley Childe, "Cancer, Public Authorities, and the Public," British Medical Journal 1 (1914): 643-645;
92. "The Need for Public Education in the Control of Cancer [leading article]," British Medical Journal 1 (1923): 509-510.
93. Oscar M. Holden, "The Present Position With Respect to Cancer," Public Health 36 (1922): 248-253, quotation from p. 253.
94. "The Early Recognition of Uterine Cancer," British Medical Journal 1 (1909): 1408-1410.
95. Childe, "Cancer, Public Authorities, and the Public," 645.
96. Figures drawn from data published in Holden, "Present Position," 251.
97. Leslie J. Reagan, "Engendering the Dread Disease: Women, Men, and Cancer," American Journal of Public Health 87 (1997): 1779-1787.
98. See, for example, Lerner, Breast Cancer Wars, 241-250.