Mona, others

[Guest guest]

Allow me to call your attention to Barron Lerner's Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth Century America. Probably a book all American women should read. It goes far beyond the usual medical view, to include important social, cultural and political factors. Especially, shows how various factors led to long-term use of useless, horrible, radical mastectomy for decades.

To go further with this theme, see Proctor's The Cancer Wars.

These ideas relate to other topics. Hitler's mother died of breast cancer, for example, and Proctor has pointed out how Hitler led Germany on a campaign to fight cancer, in his excellent and surprising The Nazi War Against Cancer, Princeton. This is an amazing book, and should be read along with his Racial Hygiene under the Nazis.

All Proctor's books are published by Princeton, and the Lerner volume is Oxford U Press.

The Nazis connected cigarette smoking to cancer, and led the world's first campaign against it. The tried to eliminate carcinogens from the workplace, and removed asbestos. They sought environment causes of cancer, something the U.S. still isn't doing adequately. It is amazing how enlightened they were.

Fighting cancer, and killing Jews, were BOTH products of the same mindset: a medicalized view of the Volksgemeinschaft. And Nazi 'socialism' had some very 'green' and leftist components in it. (They also had a campaign against alcoholism, by the way.)

Anyone with a free weekend would find it rewarding to select a sunny spot on a patio and read all four of these volumes at the same time. Start with Lerner, then read Proctor's Nazi Cancer War, then his Racial Hygiene, and then the book on Cancer and Politics.

Reading these will put a picture together. The world is a complicated place. And it is one in which we, all of us, negotiate with a 'worldview'. We can do good things based on our view of reality - as the Nazis did with cancer. But we can do terrible things using the SAME basic set of ideas. That is why constant questioning, and always checking the data, and always being open to change, are so important. It is terribly dangerous to assume you have the final answer, even if some of what you do seems good. Hitler DID good, against cancer. But his same medical/spiritual worldview led to the Holocaust. I suspect many Germans accepted his ideas about Jews BECAUSE of the good he did against cancer. What a complicated world!

Re: OT: More on and Mona.

You see, I'm old enough to know that girls always are girls. You mean when you were younger you thought we, say, turned into pumpkins? --Mona--