Breasts
Get your mind out of the gutter.
I just finished reading a couple chapters from James Olson's Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer, and History for an article that I'm writing on how cancer is dealt with in comic book memoirs. Much of the history that Olson provides was new to me, and rather fascinating. For instance, while touring the Rijksmuseum in 1967, T.C. Greco, an Italian surgeon, diagnosed the model who posed for Rembrandt's painting, Bathsheba at her Bath (1654), with breast cancer. Olson recounts Greco's experience: "He detected an asymmetry to the left breast; it seemed distended compared to her right breast. He also detected a swelling, or fullness, near her left armpit. The left breast appeared discolored, and [he] saw what might be 'peau d'orange,' a pitted section of skin with the texture of an orange peel" (9). It's true that scholars often have this horrible problem with finding evidence of their work in everything they see. I know I've been guilty of that--scrutinizing anyone who uses the word "metastasize" outside of the context of cancer, for instance, and making it MEAN something very, very evocative. I just had to read the most, um, icky book on the representation of insects from The Aeneid to Fear Factor in which every single bee buzz in Corialanus meant something really, REALLY important. Greco may have been making something out of nothing, but he subsequently learned that the model, Hendrickje Stoffels, indeed died after a long and unnamed illness. In any case, I think the value of the story is in the way it takes our usual, eroticized, and isolated perceptions of breasts and reattaches them to the living, breathing, feeling women to whom they belong.
What the book also does, then, is to provide a history to what we might already know of breasts and breast cancer. And history makes things scary. By keeping scientific advancement in the present, far removed from the history that got us to where we are, we can feel like we're at the pinnacle of discovery, close to a cure, achieving new heights of knowledge every single day. Once we attach our new knowledge to an old and long history, we might see how little distance we've covered, and, in some cases, how we've actually taken a step back. It doesn't always work that way; I mean, the airbus seems like a HUGE step backward until you see it on a timeline starting with Michelangelo's flying contraptions. Maybe. But if you're reading about breast cancer and you happen to have breasts, thing get a little scary and disheartening.
Like I've known for awhile that women, for god knows why (and please, god, if you DO know why, I'd very much appreciate an explanation that makes sense and that's fair) who don't have children (or women who have children later in life) are more likely to develop breast cancer than other women. Olson raises this point, though, historically, by way of a discussion of the mother of Louis XIV, Anne of Austria, who discovered a lump on her breast in 1663 (14). Before that happened, though, Anne, not on the best of terms with her husband Louis 13, developed a very close-knit group of female friends at the local nunneries, where she became witness to the ravages of breast cancer. Here, Olson doesn't spare us the details of one of Anne's visits to Val-de-grace in 1647: "The smell of death was in the air. Cancer cells not only divide rapidly, they also die rapidly, and when a patient is laced with tumors, the body is riddled with dead, necrotic tissue. Those tissues are rancid and rotton and emit a foul odor. To [her] horror, Anne ... saw that a tumor had destroyed one side of the nun's torso, allowing a peek into her chest cavity" (18).
See what he did there--the way he brought up a case from the past and made it a present experience? The smell of death was in the air YET the body is riddled with dead tissue. So we have the potential to become just like that 350 year old nun. I mean, I'm all for intercourse; but it troubles me that our bodies are designed (and I don't mean designed by god) to punish the nonreproducing female body. So if before I was sitting here thinking, "Great, if I don't have kids I have a higher risk of getting breast cancer," now I'm sitting here thinking, "Great, if I don't have kids I have as good a chance of getting breast cancer as a nun in 17th century France." See, we've come a long a way. Anne, by the way, thought that her cancer was a punishment from God for her vanity as doctor after doctor told her that her condition was incurable. Today, you'll still hear cancer patients talk about their cancer as if it's a punishment--if not for religious immorality then for more basic lifestyle choices. So it could have been that. It could also have been that she had her first child at 36. It could have been a lot of things.
I'm just kind of rambling now, so here's the thing (and then I'll get back to talking about giants and zombies and possibly their breasts). Maybe at one point in human evolution, it was important to encourage population growth and, as a consequence, allow those who were reproducing a better chance of survival than those who weren't (another point that Olson raises is that humans are the only mammals whose breasts appear in puberty and not during pregnancy (109) ... in other words, breasts are a sign that we're ready to copulate and increase our population). But now that population is the least of humanity's concerns (well, unless you live in Russia, apparently), can't Evolution broaden what it means to be "fit" to survive? In no way do I think mothers should be punished instead (I love moms, and I think it's important to state that it's not like younger mothers are suddenly granted immunity from breast cancer and all other manner of illness by virtue of their fertile wombs--that's far from the truth). But, seriously Evolution--breast cancer for childless women?! That's soooo 4000 B.C.
And while I'm pretending that Evolution can snap it's fingers and make it so, if I could also ask it to make the polar bears be okay and for our bodies to be made mostly out of chocolate instead of water, that would be great. Thanks!
