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Robert A. Aronowitz. Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xi + 366 pp. Ill. $30.00 (ISBN-10: 0-521-82249-1, ISBN-13: 978-0-521-82249-7).
American women today have a lifetime risk of one in eight of being diagnosed with breast cancer. Is it a wonder, then, that cancer inspires more fear in the twenty-first century than it did at the beginning of the nineteenth, the starting point of this study?
Clinician and medical historian Robert Aronowitz invites us to look beyond the headline-grabbing statistics and place current concerns about breast cancer risk within the long "unnatural" history of this awful disease. The central development he analyzes is the historical change in the last two centuries from isolated, private fears of breast cancer to immense individual and collective concern over breast cancer risk. Aronowitz sides with those historians who have argued that disease cannot be reduced to its biological components. In...