Cancer Quackery

Abstract

This chapter brings in patients and practitioners whose views on cancer diverged from those of the London and Edinburgh elites. Analysis of their perspectives demonstrates that the climate of pessimism surrounding cancer’s intractability was not hegemonic, and that various voices of dissent existed both within and without the ‘regular’ profession. This chapter reconsiders the medical marketplace and places the concept of incurability at the centre of patient choice and professional self-fashioning. The suffering that cancer patients were willing to undergo suggest that for many the diagnosis of an incurable disease and subsequent offers of palliative care alone were unsatisfying. Incurability made space for a crowded medical marketplace that catered for desperately ill people and provided treatments of last resort.