Darker Ribbon

"A fascinating cultural history of breast cancer."*This first cultural history of the social attitudes and treatments surrounding breast cancer in the past century powerfully examines the relationship between women and their doctors. At the heart of the book are two unpublished correspondences-one between Barbara Mueller, a woman diagnosed with breast cancer eighty years ago, and her surgeon, William Steward Halsted, father of the radical mastectomy, and the other between Rachel Carson, who was writing Silent Spring as she was battling breast cancer, and her personal physician George Crile, Jr.