BROOKE GLADSTONE:
In the last two weeks, two high-profile cases of cancer.
MALE ANNOUNCER:
Past week, a new spotlight has been shone on this often-incurable disease with the back-to-back revelations that Elizabeth Edwards and White House spokesman Tony Snow's cancer is back.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Elizabeth Edwards suggested she was no different from thousands of others.
JAMES S. OLSON:
She made a wonderful comment. She said, you know, yesterday I found out that I had breast cancer. Another woman, she also found out yesterday and she had to be at work at 8 o'clock this morning.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
That's James Olson, history professor and author of Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer and History, written in part as a way to cope with the amputation of his hand and forearm due to cancer.

He said he focused his research on breast cancer because for centuries breast cancer was cancer, the only visible form, and it afflicted women, who kept much better records of their experiences through letters and journals.

Later, of course, other cancers were identified, tragedies kept a secret behind closed doors. Occasionally, a window opened on the disease, on those rare occasions when famous Americans were afflicted and made it public - among them, the enormously popular Ulysses S. Grant, who had just finished his Presidency and was writing his memoirs when he was diagnosed with mouth cancer. His was a high-profile death. Then, in 1893, Grover Cleveland was diagnosed.
JAMES S. OLSON:
They snuck President Cleveland off to a yacht in the East River in New York. They didn't want the news to get out because they were afraid it might rattle the stock market. They did surgery on him and gave him kind of an artificial jawbone. But Cleveland survived, and the news of his surgery didn't get out for a considerable time.

But when it did, it became obvious that surgery had cured his cancer, and therefore, suddenly, for the first time, it wasn't just someone trying to shop a cure and make money off it. It really had worked.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
In the '40s, there were several high-profile cancers, and this represented a kind of turning point. Can you tell us about the two Babes?
JAMES S. OLSON:
You know, Babe Ruth, the homerun king for the New York Yankees, he had developed an image of somebody who was invincible. He drank, he caroused. Then he hit homeruns with hangovers. And then he came down with head and neck cancer in his throat.

Ruth made a conscious decision to not hide it, not try to cover it up. And so the press moved in on his disease, and his disease was really more public than most people's had been in a long time, since Ulysses S. Grant.

Even more significant than that one, however, in the 1950s, the most prominent female athlete in America history, Babe Detrichson Zaharias, came down with colon cancer.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
She won two Gold Medals and one Silver Medal for track and field in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, and she played organized baseball, softball.
JAMES S. OLSON:
Great golfer. She had colon cancer. And colon cancer was always one of the more stigmatized of the cancers. It resurrects some of the very old-fashioned ideas about cancer being filthy.

But Babe was quite public about it. She continued to play and win tournaments, and eventually the colon cancer killed her. But America followed her death, and she was so forthright about it – that, again, it's a celebrity who wasn't ashamed of having cancer.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:
But the disease still carried a social stigma, didn't it? Obituaries didn't refer to cancer as a cause of death.
JAMES S. OLSON:
Absolutely there was a stigma to it. And it's interesting, because people had long since known that it wasn't contagious, but the disease itself was so intractable. You know, it's a death sentence in a land of ice-cream and sunshine, where we're supposed to be able to solve all problems if we put out minds to it. And yet cancer's been very, very refractory, is the term physicians use when chemotherapy [LAUGHS] doesn't work.

For me, it's going to go back to Susan Sontag and the Illness as Metaphor, and, you know, the fact that once we understood the cause of tuberculosis, tuberculosis rapidly lost its mystical power. And its metaphors have still been discussed because it was just a disease caused by, you know, a bacterium.

Once we know more and more about the causes of cancer, I think the same thing is going to happen to it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
The American Cancer Society was founded in 1945. Do you think it had an impact on the uh, the image of the disease?
JAMES S. OLSON:
Oh, absolutely. What the American Cancer Society did is they widely distributed the seven warning signs of cancer. And those warning signs were, you know, a lump in the breast, unexplained bleeding. And when you start talking about, you know, breast cancer and cervical cancer and colon cancer and so on, you're talking about bodily functions. So the very fact of creating that public health campaign, you know, you end up pulling the disease out of the closet a little bit and making it less shameful as a cultural or political phenomenon.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
I know Barbara Ehrenreich has written with a certain amount of rancor on the power of positive thinking campaigns that would seem to place the blame for cancer on the victim.
JAMES S. OLSON:
Well, you know, that's a phenomenon that goes back to the end of the 1970s. When I was, you know, first diagnosed with my sarcoma in 1981, you had a best-selling book out by a couple - called the Simontons - and they alleged that you could deal with your own disease by imaging your body, by galvanizing your own immune system to fight the cancer.

The problem with it is if your cancer recurred, you blamed yourself. And that theory of a connection between somebody's emotional state and the outbreak of cancer - I'm not going to deny that there might be a connection, but my problem with that is that a lot of nickel-and-dime psychologists built cottage industries and then massive industries making money selling that notion to cancer patients.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So you watched the press over the last week as they covered both Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow. What do you think the coverage says about the evolution of attitudes towards the disease?
JAMES S. OLSON:
Well, personally, I'm very annoyed with people who sit in judgment of somebody else's decision. You know, I remember back in the '80s, President Reagan's wife Nancy came down with breast cancer, and she decided to have a mastectomy. And what happened was Mrs. Reagan was severely criticized from some people in the women's movement, saying that all she needed was a lumpectomy and that by getting a mastectomy she's set a bad example for other women.

To sit in judgment of someone's decision when you haven't been there and haven't had it just seems to me to be the height of arrogance.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And did it bother you at all that some of the discussion over the decision of the Edwards' to continue with the campaign seemed to imply that she was going to fall ill and he would need to be there by her side?
JAMES S. OLSON:
Absolutely. Yeah. The assumption is that the cancer's going to kill her, and that by doing this they're going to take away time from their children, that raw and rank ambition is trumping family values. What a crock! You know, it's just absurd.

What is she supposed to do? What is the alternative? Is the alternative for her to just kind of go back and hide in her nice home in North Carolina and wait till it kills her? You know, live her life, which I think is the right of every cancer survivor to do.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much.
JAMES S. OLSON:
Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
James Olson is a professor of history at Sam Houston State University, and author of Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer and History.
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BOB GARFIELD:
This is On the Media from NPR.