MEDICINE STORIES – Each year, the month of October is devoted to breast cancer and the promotion of screening. An idea born of a partnership between the industry and the American Cancer Society in 1985, but whose roots actually go much further…
“I AM sorry madam, but the New York Times cannot publish the word breast or the word cancer in its pages…” When, in the early 1950s, Fanny Rosenow heard these words from a newspaper editor, she was disappointed, but probably not surprised. Treated for breast cancer, she set up a support group for women with the disease and wants to advertise it, say Jimmie Holland and Sheldon Lewis in The Human Side of Cancer (Harper Collins, 2001). But in the America of the 1950s, cancer leads its way in silence: we are silent and we suffer at home. “Perhaps you could say that there will be a meeting on diseases of the rib cage…”, tries the journalist awkwardly. A few decades later, another atmosphere: “You can no longer look away”proclaim it New York Times Magazine on the cover, in 1993, with a full-page photo of the artist Matuschka showing off the scar of his mastectomy.
In between, the activism of…
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