Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 ‘One of the Most Grievous and Rebellious Diseases’: Defining, Diagnosing and the Causes of Cancer
- 2 ‘But Sad Resources’: Treating Cancer in the Eighteenth Century
- 3 Women's Agency and Role in Choice of Treatment
- 4 ‘So Frightful to the Very Imagination’: Pain, Emotions and Cancer in the Breast
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
1 - ‘One of the Most Grievous and Rebellious Diseases’: Defining, Diagnosing and the Causes of Cancer
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 ‘One of the Most Grievous and Rebellious Diseases’: Defining, Diagnosing and the Causes of Cancer
- 2 ‘But Sad Resources’: Treating Cancer in the Eighteenth Century
- 3 Women's Agency and Role in Choice of Treatment
- 4 ‘So Frightful to the Very Imagination’: Pain, Emotions and Cancer in the Breast
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In the long eighteenth century, cancer was considered to be among the most horrible diseases, a misery which one could hardly wish for anyone:
Is there a Man you hate,
Or wish the hardest Fate,
Bid neither Plague, nor Pox,
Nor fam'd Pandora's Box,
Bid neither Gout, nor Stone,
But (letting these alone)
If wretcheder you'll make him,
Then bid the Cancer take him.
In medical discourse cancer was characterized in intense terms: it was ‘of all the maladies to which human nature is subjected, the most formidable in its appearance’ ‘one of the most loathsome disorders to which the human body is subject’ ‘miserable and deplorable’ ‘the most grievous and rebellious’, ‘horrid’ and ‘cruel’ disease, indeed ‘one of the most excruciating and intractable maladies incident to human nature’. William Nisbet elaborated on the horrors of cancer:
With a slow, but rooted grasp, it undermines the existence at a more advanced period of age, and under the torments of the most exquisite and lingering pain, as well as a state of the most loathsome putrefaction, it consigns its miserable victims to a late but long wished-for grave, after rendering them, by its ravages, even still more than the former malady [scrofula] hideous spectacles of deformity.
John Aitken noted that even the slightest sign of cancer was a reason for examination of the situation: ‘Cancer is always full of danger, the slightest degree of it is justly alarming’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth Century , pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014