The Cancer ProblemPub Date : 2021-01-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866145.003.0005
A. Arnold-Forster
{"title":"Cancer Quackery","authors":"A. Arnold-Forster","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198866145.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198866145.003.0005","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":292071,"journal":{"name":"The Cancer Problem","volume":"114 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116596656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Cancer ProblemPub Date : 2021-01-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866145.003.0004
A. Arnold-Forster
{"title":"Cancer Therapeutics","authors":"A. Arnold-Forster","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198866145.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198866145.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter investigates the invention, application, assessment, and justification of palliative surgery through the work of two practitioners: Charles Bell (1774–1842) and James Young Simpson (1811–1970). As this chapter will show, close attention to patient pain and suffering was essential to surgeons’ assessments of the efficacy of palliative surgery. Bell and Simpson performed palliative procedures partly because they were concerned by their patients’ suffering and, as suggested in Chapter 2, partly because they wanted to present themselves as enlightened, improving gentlemen. Indeed, the texts analysed here—and the promotion of palliative surgery more generally—provide an alternative portrayal to that of the crude and dispassionate Victorian practitioner.","PeriodicalId":292071,"journal":{"name":"The Cancer Problem","volume":"26 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116706238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Cancer ProblemPub Date : 2021-01-18DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198866145.003.0002
A. Arnold-Forster
{"title":"From Home to Hospital","authors":"A. Arnold-Forster","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198866145.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198866145.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the senses and emotions that attended living with and dying from cancer in the early nineteenth century. The archives of The Middlesex Hospital consist of registers of cancer patients from 1792 through to the twentieth century, and a potted selection of casebooks. This chapter, therefore, tells the stories of sixty patients from 1805 to 1836. From these case notes, flesh and blood can be added to the lived experience of cancer and go some way towards recovering the patient voice. We can follow in their footsteps from home to hospital, and in multiple literal and metaphorical ways appreciate the distances they travelled in their ‘cancer journeys’.","PeriodicalId":292071,"journal":{"name":"The Cancer Problem","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121844365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}