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Eleven essays by historians and sociologists examine cancer research and treatment as everyday practice in post-war Europe and North America. These are not stories of inevitable medical progress and obstacles overcome, but of historical contingencies, cultural differences, hope, and often disappointed expectations.

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Table of Contents Table of Figures Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction; C.Timmermann & E.Toon Three Stories: Generations of Breast Cancer; J.Baines Running Out of Options: Surgery, Hope and Progress in the Management of Lung Cancer, 1950s to 1990s; C.Timmermann A Case Study in Human Experimentation: The Patient as Subject, Object and Victim; G.J.Kutcher Captain Chemo and Mr Wiggly: Patient Information for Children with Cancer in the Late Twentieth Century; E.B.Johnstone Knife, Rays and Women: Controversies about the Uses of Surgery versus Radiotherapy in the Treatment of Female Cancers in France and in the US, 1920-1960; I.Löwy Measured Responses: British Clinical Researchers and Therapies for Advanced Breast Cancer in the 1960s and 1970s; E.Toon Cancer Research and Protocol Patients: From Clinical Material to Committee Advisors; P.Keating & A.Cambrosio Uncertain Enthusiasm: PSA Screening, Proton Therapy, and Prostate Cancer; H.Valier Patients and their Problems: Situated Alliances of Patient-Centred Care and Pathway Development; T.Zuiderent-Jerak , R.Bal & M.Berg Radicalism, Neoliberalism and Biographical Medicine: Constructions of English Patients and Patient Histories around 1980 and Now; J.V.Pickstone Index

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(Regarding this and Timmermann´s latest book, A History of Lung Cancer: The Recalcitrant Disease, 2014) "These books, with their origins in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, present an excellent insight into what it has been to have cancer. Collectively, they present three theses of great value to historians of medicine. The first of these is that no single way of writing the history of cancer can ever be adequate. Cancer is transformative in ways that are anything but simple, meaning that a profusion of different narratives and techniques are required to approach anything like understanding. Second, the field of cancer medicine challenges the historian of medicine because it has often been without progress, a recurring if not universal trope among historians. The third thesis is this: not all cancers are equal. In its broadest sense, this observation is trivial. Yet these books excel at fleshing out this bit of general knowledge by illustrating substantive differences between different cancers in different contexts over the twentieth century." - Brendan Clarke, University College London, UK

"In placing the choices, subjective experiences and individual voices of people with cancer in the foreground, this collection offers a more nuanced reading of the contingencies and politics of care pathways, the ethical tensions between collective and individual, and the blurred distinctions between experimental and therapeutic. ... This volume is, at long last, a contribution to the historiography that manages to liberate individuals from the generic category of ´the patient´ and relieve them of service to histories created by others. After all, this is a history that we all stand a good chance of contributing to." - Catriona Gilmour Hamilton, Oxford Brookes University, UK

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