My book, #TheCancerProblem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain, is being published by @OUPHistory next week. Since we can't do in-person book launches, I thought I'd compile a thread to give you a taster of what awaits if you/your uni is lucky enough to acquire a copy

#TheCancerProblem tells the story of malignancy in C19 Britain and its Empire. There was no 'conspiracy of silence' surrounding cancer in the C19. Instead, it was then that the disease acquired the unique symbolic, emotional, and politicised status it maintains today

The book makes two key arguments.From the late C18, cancer was defined as not just incurable, but unusually so. Cancer can, therefore, prompt us to rethink the very notion of 'incurability', both past and present.

In this book, I take a more expansive understanding of incurability to allow us to see the concept, perhaps paradoxically, as productive. Cancer’s incurability was not just an obstacle to overthrow, but a galvanizing and intellectually provocative idea...

...one that shifted medicine, healthcare, and professional identity in profound and lasting ways. I show how cancer’s incurability enabled the construction of professional credentials and community values; made hospitals into places for treating terminal illness...

...made possible the invention of palliative surgery as a means of relieving suffering without performing a ‘complete’ cure; and brought into being certain modes of investigating the disease, such as mapping, the microscope, and discourses of progress and decline.

#TheCancerProblem also argues that this incurability was implicated in cancer’s complex relationship
with ‘modern life’. I argue that C19 versions of medical modernity were dependent on cancer and that the disease was perceived as a product and pathology of progress

The book also makes other, smaller arguments! It begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding the Middlesex Hospital in London, where in 1792 the country's first cancer ward was established

The hospital's archives contains the case notes of poor men and women who lived with and died from cancer in C19 London. #TheCancerProblem uses these archives to explore pain, suffering, the codification of cancer, and its construction as an incurable malady

I argue that cancer's incurability prompted the development of a kind of palliative surgery, one that sought to alleviate suffering rather than 'cure'. I also suggest that the peculiarities of #TheCancerProblem redrew the boundaries between orthodoxy and quackery

Faced with cancer's incurability, mid-C19 doctors and public health practitioners sought alternative ways to think about and manage malignancy. They tried to impose order onto the messiness of #TheCancerProblem by counting, tabulating, and mapping its incidence

Then, they had another idea. Maybe cancer was contagious and maybe, just maybe, if they identified the guilty microbe it could - just like other epidemic diseases of the late century - be controlled?

By the end of the C19, cancer seemed to be increasing in prevalence. However, this increase was uneven. It seemed to expanding at a greater rate in wealthy, affluent areas of Britain and it seemed to affect 'superior races' more than their 'inferior' counterparts...

If cancer was not latent in the landscape, nor a waxing and waning infectious disease, then maybe cancer’s increasing incidence was a sign of some change in the bodies and
lifestyles of the British nation and its inhabitants?

You'll have to buy/borrow it to find out whether cancer really was a product of progress...! You can find a copy here and hopefully in any good university library. Please do ask me any questions, very happy to chat about all things cancer https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-cancer-problem-9780198866145?cc=gb&lang=en&#

If you're into audiobooks, you can also buy & listen to it here: https://www.audible.com/search?keywords=agnes+arnold-forster&ref=a_hp_t1_header_search

Or! If you want to listen to me talk *about* the book, you can tune in to this @NewBooksNetwork podcast: https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-cancer-problem