TY - BOOK AU - Skuse, Alanna AB - The study of early modern cancer is significant for our understanding of the period’s medical theory and practice. In many respects, cancer exemplifies the flexibility of early modern medical thought, which managed to accommodate, seemingly without friction, the notion that cancer was a disease with humoral origins alongside the conviction that the malady was in some sense ontologically independent. Discussions of why cancer spread rapidly through the body, and was difficult, if not impossible, to cure, prompted various medical explanations at the same time that physicians and surgeons joined with non-medical authors in describing the disease as acting in a way that was ‘malignant’ in the fullest sense, purposely ‘fierce’, ‘rebellious’ and intractable.3 Theories seeking to explain why cancer appeared most often in the female breast similarly joined culturally mediated anatomical and humoral theory with recognition of the peculiarities of women’s social, domestic and emotional life-cycles. Moreover, as a morbid disease, cancer generated eclectic and sometimes extreme medical responses, the mixed results of which would prompt many questions over the proper extent of pharmaceutical or surgical intervention. DO - 10.1057/9781137487537 ID - OAPEN ID: 604171 ID - OAPEN ID: OCN: 936036151 ID - OAPEN ID: http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/32826 KW - cancer KW - early modernity KW - early modern cancer KW - england KW - early modern medical thought KW - Arsenic KW - Breast cancer KW - Canker KW - Humorism KW - Medicine KW - Uterus L1 - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/32826/1/604171.pdf L1 - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/32826/1/604171.pdf L1 - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/32826/1/604171.pdf LA - English LK - https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/33312 PB - Springer Nature PP - Basingstoke PY - 2015 SN - 9781137569196;9781137487537 TI - Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England : Ravenous Natures ER -