What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

“Love also expressed strong opinions about the role of gender in science and medicine. Surgical oncology, especially breast cancer surgery, was far from an exact science. ‘Often,’ she preached, 'the result is that the values of a white, middle-aged man are imposed on a patient who is female and maybe older or younger, maybe white and maybe not.’ To an older widow, Love recalled, a young male surgeon recommended removal of the breast: 'Well, you’re elderly and you’re widowed - you don’t need your breast anymore. Why don’t you just have a mastectomy?: It’ll be easier.’ He could not fathom an elderly woman who might want to keep her breast. In a 1994 interview with NBC’s Dateline, Love recounted another example. When a young patient asked her male surgeon what a reconstructed, postmastectomy breast would feel like, he reassured her, 'It will feel perfectly normal, no different from your other breast.’ Actually, mastectomies sever nerves in the chest and axilla. The new breast and the area surrounding it feel odd and different, numb and insensitive, attached to the body but not really part of it. The doctor had misconstrued her question. What he was telling the young woman was that it would feel normal to the touch of any man. It would feel normal to him." 

- Bathsheba’s Breast: Women, Cancer and History, by James S. Olson, Chapter Ten: The Breast Cancer Wars, pg. 198

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