Every October for the last four decades, Breast Cancer Awareness Month has helped to raise visibility of the most prevalent cancer on Earth — one that takes almost three-quarters of a million lives every year.
Despite recorded cases stretching back to ancient Egypt, breast cancer was considered an “unspeakable” condition for millennia. Women were expected to suffer in silence and “dignity.”
This stigma fueled academic ignorance, with breast cancer languishing as a relatively unstudied disease until just a few decades ago. For most of the last century, a woman suffering from breast cancer would be offered radiation therapy and/or surgery — often radical surgery, leaving them disfigured for little benefit — while the treatment of other cancers progressed.