Book excerpt: The first cultural history of breast cancer, this book examines the social attitudes and medical treatments that together defined the modern relationship between women with the disease and their doctors. At the heart of the book are two unpublished correspondences-one between Barbara Mueller, a woman diagnosed with breast cancer eighty years ago, and her surgeon, William Steward Halsted, father of the radical mastectomy, and the other between Rachel Carson, who was writing Silent Spring as she was battling breast cancer, and her personal physician George Crile, Jr.