How Cancer Crossed the Color Line
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- $36.99
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- $36.99
Publisher Description
In the course of the 20th century, cancer went from being perceived as a white woman's nemesis to a "democratic disease" to a fearsome threat in communities of color. Drawing on film and fiction, on medical and epidemiological evidence, and on patients' accounts, Keith Wailoo tracks this transformation in cancer awareness, revealing how not only awareness, but cancer prevention, treatment, and survival have all been refracted through the lens of race.
Spanning more than a century, the book offers a sweeping account of the forces that simultaneously defined cancer as an intensely individualized and personal experience linked to whites, often categorizing people across the color line as racial types lacking similar personal dimensions. Wailoo describes how theories of risk evolved with changes in women's roles, with African-American and new immigrant migration trends, with the growth of federal cancer surveillance, and with diagnostic advances, racial protest, and contemporary health activism. The book examines such powerful and transformative social developments as the mass black migration from rural south to urban north in the 1920s and 1930s, the World War II experience at home and on the war front, and the quest for civil rights and equality in health in the 1950s and '60s. It also explores recent controversies that illuminate the diversity of cancer challenges in America, such as the high cancer rates among privileged women in Marin County, California, the heavy toll of prostate cancer among black men, and the questions about why Vietnamese-American women's cervical cancer rates are so high.
A pioneering study, How Cancer Crossed the Color Line gracefully documents how race and gender became central motifs in the birth of cancer awareness, how patterns and perceptions changed over time, and how the "war on cancer" continues to be waged along the color line.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wailoo (The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine) uses breast cancer as a prism to look at how gender, race, and economic class not only determines the availability of medical treatment but also the way disease is defined. Referencing literary and medical sources, he shows how views of cancer have changed over the course of a century; statistics from the 1920s, for instance, showed that affluent white women had the highest mortality rate from cancer, having moved from ninth place at the beginning of the century, to sixth. One explanation given at the time was a "growing female political and economic independence" that allowed them to have fewer children and to bottle feed rather than nurse them. By contrast, blacks were considered to be leading a more natural, "primitive" existence believed at the time to be free of the "stresses of modern life" and intrinsically healthier. Urbanization and the Civil Rights movement introduced reforms like Medicare and Medicaid, opening treatment to the poor; the statistical gap has steadily decreased since. Wailoo also explores the transformation of the paternalistic doctor/patient relationship from the 1920s when doctors routinely lied to patients with fatal ailments to the present. A nuanced study of a complex subject.
