Why Are We So Weird About Cancer?

Culture Study Podcast

Anne Helen Petersen

Fashion & Beauty, Society & Culture, Arts

4.6 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2024

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You might look at the question in the title of this episode and think: duh, it’s because we’re weird about death. But cancer is so common, with so many different variations, with so many ways it can touch your life, in ways immediate and lasting… that of course we’ve figured out ways to be weird about it. Of course there are bizarre metaphors, of course we don’t have space for the messy, extended work of recovery; of course there are bizarre tropes and plot lines intended to make cancer more understandable which just make so many people feel like they’re “failing” at cancer when their own experiences don’t fit the popular narrative trajectory.

Dr. Stacy Wentworth is an oncologist, the author of the newsletter Cancer Culture, and the host of Less Radical, a new podcast about the surgeon who revolutionized breast cancer treatment — and changed the way we understand cancer today. And I knew she’d be the perfect person to talk about the way we talk about cancer, all the weirdness that can accompany it, and how that discourse has changed over time.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Culture Study podcast, and I'm Ann Helen Peterson.
0:10.1	And I'm Stacey Wentworth, a board-certified radiation oncologist.
0:14.3	I write a substack called Cancer Culture, and I host the new podcast, Less Radical.
0:20.0	Amazing.
0:20.7	So one of the reasons that we wanted to have you on the show today is that you have a new podcast out that is produced with Melody.
0:28.8	And I feel like she's like the proud mom with like her two daughters watching us right now, you know.
0:35.7	So we both love Melody. But I also just, I've heard so much
0:39.4	about the show as it's gone through development. And it came out a couple weeks ago. So please
0:44.4	tell us about the show. Sure. So of course, Melody is a visionary and really helped us
0:51.7	bring this idea together.
0:58.2	So the podcast is about a hidden figure.
1:00.3	His name is Dr. Bernard Fisher.
1:07.2	He was a Jewish surgeon from Pittsburgh who revolutionized cancer treatment and specifically breast cancer treatment.
1:08.5	So he was the first person really to upend centuries of thought
1:15.1	that cancer had one direction and it was out from the cancer to the lymph nodes. And the thought at the
1:23.5	time, and sometimes patients still ask me this today, is there was a, there's a moment in time
1:30.2	when you can capture all the cancer cells. So up until Dr. Fisher, people thought that cancer
1:36.4	failed because the surgery wasn't big enough. So you just didn't go big enough. So there were
1:41.9	these radical and super radical surgeries. In breast
1:45.6	cancer, they were talking about amputating women's arms. And if they could just figure out
1:50.9	the direct pathway that cancer spread to their legs, that they could amputate their femurs.
1:56.0	So it was just this surgical thought. And in those surgeon's defenses, really the only thing
	...

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