- Person
- Rose Kushner
- Lived
- 1929–1990
- Field
- Breast cancer advocacy
- From
- American
The story
In the early 1970s an American woman with a suspicious breast lump usually went under general anaesthesia for a biopsy. If the tissue showed cancer, the surgeon went straight on to a Halsted radical mastectomy, removing the breast, chest muscles and armpit lymph nodes. She often did not know until she woke up whether she still had her breast, and she had no part in the decision.
Rose Kushner, a Baltimore-born journalist raised by Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrant parents, found a lump in June 1974. She read the medical literature at the National Library of Medicine and decided the one-step procedure was unnecessary. Many surgeons refused her request for a biopsy alone. When the biopsy showed cancer, she chose a less extensive modified radical mastectomy, which she obtained at Roswell Park in Buffalo, New York.
She then turned her research into a book, Breast Cancer: A Personal History and Investigative Report, published in 1975 and revised as Why Me? It argued that women should be fully conscious and informed when the decision was made. In 1975 she set up the Breast Cancer Advisory Center, a hotline and information service that answered thousands of women; some letters reached her addressed only to “Mrs. Breast Cancer, Kensington, MD.” She was booed by surgeons, but in May 1976 she became the first person to testify to the Senate health subcommittee on breast cancer.
In 1977 she was the only non-physician named to a National Institutes of Health panel on breast cancer treatment. Its 1979 conclusions said the Halsted radical should no longer be standard, and Kushner persuaded the panel to call for an end to one-step surgery. Dr. Bruce Chabner of the National Cancer Institute later called her probably the single most important person in ending the practice. By her death in 1990, the Washington Post reported, the two-step procedure was routine virtually throughout the world.
Why it matters
Women with a breast lump now get a diagnosis first and time to understand their options and help choose their treatment.
About Rose Kushner
Baltimore-born journalist who, after her own diagnosis, led the fight to end the one-step breast biopsy and mastectomy, giving women the right to know and choose their treatment.
Sources
- Rose Kushner Jewish Women’s Archive
- Rose Kushner, Advocate for Cancer Patients, Dies (Washington Post, 1990) Veteran Feminists of America
- Rose Kushner: War correspondent and breast cancer advocate The Cancer Letter
- Rose Kushner Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.