Cancer Patients, Cancer Pathways

Reviews / Votes

(Regarding this and Timmermann's latest book, A History of Lung Cancer: The Recalcitrant Disease, 2014) "These books, with their origins in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, present an excellent insight into what it has been to have cancer. Collectively, they present three theses of great value to historians of medicine. The first of these is that no single way of writing the history of cancer can ever be adequate. Cancer is transformative in ways that are anything but simple, meaning that a profusion of different narratives and techniques are required to approach anything like understanding. Second, the field of cancer medicine challenges the historian of medicine because it has often been without progress, a recurring if not universal trope among historians. The third thesis is this: not all cancers are equal. In its broadest sense, this observation is trivial. Yet these books excel at fleshing out this bit of general knowledge by illustrating substantive differences between different cancers in different contexts over the twentieth century." - Brendan Clarke, University College London, UK

"In placing the choices, subjective experiences and individual voices of people with cancer in the foreground, this collection offers a more nuanced reading of the contingencies and politics of care pathways, the ethical tensions between collective and individual, and the blurred distinctions between experimental and therapeutic. ... This volume is, at long last, a contribution to the historiography that manages to liberate individuals from the generic category of 'the patient' and relieve them of service to histories created by others. After all, this is a history that we all stand a good chance of contributing to." - Catriona Gilmour Hamilton, Oxford Brookes University, UK