When Babette Rosmond published her book The Invisible Worm 50 years ago, it was a daring act of courage and a call to arms for women with breast cancer.
writes about her experiences. Illness memoirs, hardly only about breast cancer, are now a popular genre. 50 years ago, it was a daring act of courage and a spot-on example of contemporary feminist activism. Rosmond’s book was a call to arms to all women with breast cancer, beseeching them to ask their doctors about treatment options instead of passively accepting a radical mastectomy.
So Rosmond went looking for a surgeon who would only do a biopsy of the breast lump, not a whole operation if it turned out to be a small cancer intraoperatively. It wasn’t easy to find such a doctor. When the biopsy came back as cancer and Rosmond declined immediate radical surgery, the surgeon was livid—and patronizing.When Rosmond said she wanted three weeks to explore her options, he played his trump card.
in 1972. The book was funny, as Rosmond manages to weave her dog’s sex life and her love of the Beatles into the story of her cancer. But it was serious as well. A patient—especially a woman—questioning male surgeons was revolutionary for the time. After her book was published, Rosmond appeared on The Today Show
Susskind was so uncomfortable with Rosmond that at one point he called her “Mrs. Civilian” to remind viewers she was not a physician. But Rosmond had no interest in playing doctor—she just wanted women to know they had right to choose among options.I think what I did was the highest level of women’s liberation. I said ‘no’ to a group of doctors who told me, ‘You must sign this paper, you don’t have to know what it’s all about.