Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer, and History

An absorbing and unsettling history of breast cancer told through the stories of women who have confronted it from ancient times to the present.
A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year

In 1967, an Italian surgeon touring Amsterdam's Rijks museum stopped in front of Rembrandt's Bathsheba at Her Bath and noticed an asymmetry to Bathsheba's left breast; it seemed distended, swollen near the armpit, discolored, and marked with a distinctive pitting. The physician learned that Rembrandt's model...