'Whose breast is it anyway?': A change in breast cancer discourse and practice

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of the popular and medical discourse through which the Halsted radical mastectomy for breast cancer was described, recommended, institutionalized, and finally replaced by a less mutilating procedure almost a century later, in 1979. My dissertation shows how the production of patient-centered discourse has helped to shape and control knowledge and power that were formerly the exclusive domain of the "expert," and what happens when subjugated "uncontrollable" discourses begin to be recognized and assimilated into the official discourse of the medical establishment.; Through the work of social scientist Ann Greer, scientist Thomas Kuhn, and literary critics Michel Foucault and Bakhtin, I argue that there must be a closer examination of specific extra-scientific social and cultural factors that influence decision-making in breast cancer treatment.; I conclude by arguing that the medical community must consider discursive issues of knowledge and power more fully in order to prevent the continuing lag between the dissemination of medical knowledge and practice and to provide more satisfactory patient treatment.