Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society

by Robert A. Aronowitz

In the early nineteenth century in the United States, cancer in the breast was a rare disease. Now it seems that breast cancer is everywhere. Written by a medical historian who is also a doctor, Unnatural History tells how and why this happened. Rather than there simply being more disease, breast cancer has entered the bodies of so many American women and the concerns of nearly all the rest, mostly as a result of how we have detected, labeled, and responded to the disease. The book traces changing definitions and understandings of breast cancer, the experience of breast cancer sufferers, clinical and public health practices, and individual and societal fears.

380 pages, Hardcover

First published October 8, 2007

Reviews

[Miranda · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book took me so long to read that I gave up with two and a half chapters to go. It's convoluted and long winded in the worst possible way. There were few points made in the book that were particularly eye-opening, but the rest was just a mess.

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ladies remember to check your breasts!

[Saaya Morton · Rating 2 out of 5]

A slow review of the history of breast cancer in American society.

[Cassandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Do you enjoy reading cut and dry medical histories? Do you want people to think that you enjoy studying gender, without actually interacting with any of those messy social and cultural frameworks? Then this is the book for you!

Aronowitz uses one particularly interesting theme: Risk should be treated as a social construct, "not simply a number...[but] a set of beliefs, practices, and structural elements" (256). This drew me in, and I had high expectations. He had plenty of opportunities to tie this argument into the larger feminist historiography of the doctor-patient relationship. Sadly, he missed all of them, so when he does discuss this pivotal relationship, it remains the reader's responsibility to insert any gendered themes between the lines. He has written about a deeply gendered topic while leaving his narrative profoundly devoid of gendered analysis. I found this especially disappointing.

This author has done what I had previously thought impossible: He has made a 300 page book about breasts boring.