The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

By the late 1960s, the relationship between doctors and patients had begun to shift dramatically. Medicine, once considered virtually infallible in its judgment, was turning out to have deep fallibilities—flaws that appeared to cluster pointedly around issues of women’s health. Thalidomide, prescribed widely to control pregnancy-associated nausea and “anxiety,” was hastily withdrawn from the market in 1961 because of its propensity to cause severe fetal malformations. In Texas, Jane Roe (a pseudonym) sued the state for blocking her ability to abort her fetus at a medical clinic—launching the Roe v. Wade case on abortion and highlighting the complex nexus between the state, medical authority, and women’s bodies. Political feminism, in short, was birthing medical feminism—and the fact that one of the most common and most disfiguring operations performed on women’s bodies had never been formally tested in a trial stood out as even more starkly disturbing to a new generation of women. “Refuse to submit to a radical mastectomy,” Crile exhorted his patients in 1973.