This article is part of the following series: Disability from the South: Toward a Lexicon
“Everything started with a little spot in the head, right up [by] my right ear! I don’t even remember the precise day or week I discovered it. Instead, I remember that it still hurts and I have a persistent headache!” Fadhili said with a feeble voice brightened by a soft smile. As our discussion of his health continued, he kept …
In the class I teach on illness narratives, cancer comes after the plague. In the realm of representation and cultural memory, infectious diseases have a long visual and allegorical pedigree. Pestilence is always already more than an epidemiological reality. With cancer culture things are different. A cursory search for early modern images of cancer in the U.S. National Library of …
Health Advocacy Inc. How Pharmaceutical Funding Changed the Breast Cancer Movement
UBC Press, 2017, 383 pages
After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1988, Sharon Batt became of the one the most prominent figures of the grassroots breast cancer movement that flourished in North America during the 1990s. A committed journalist and editor working mainly for feminist …
Recently, a number of news outlets reported the results of a new research study on the correlation between hormonal contraceptives and breast cancer. The study analyzed data from several Danish national health registers, following 1.8 million women between 15 and 49 years of age. Previous studies of breast-cancer risk among women who use hormonal contraceptives reported inconsistent findings – from …
In the Stanford Hospital car park, there is a sign that reads “WARNING: This garage contains gasoline and diesel engine exhaust which is known to the State of California to cause cancer and/or reproductive toxicity.” The paradox is deadly – one runs the risk of developing cancer on their way to cancer treatment. The sign blatantly highlights the starting point …
Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic
Duke University Press, 2012
Julie Livingston’s Improvising Medicine is a lucid, poignant, and devastating book about the stakes of a growing cancer epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa that is trailing the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This ethnography takes place mainly on the recently established oncology ward of Princess …