The color of cancer: Disease and the measure of race in the United States from the 1920s to the 1990s
Item
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Title
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The color of cancer: Disease and the measure of race in the United States from the 1920s to the 1990s
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:a4a2f923a512:10055
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identifier
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10049
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Creator
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Mei, Leyla,
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Contributor
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David Nasaw
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American history | Medicine | Ethnic studies | Oncology | Cancer | History of Medicine | Race
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Abstract
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This dissertation analyzes the ways in which cancer researchers in the United States understood, measured, and defined race between 1920 and the turn of the twenty-first century. Shifting interpretations of its relationship to carcinogenesis forced doctors to confront multiple definitions of race as they struggled to untangle the medical significance of various racial traits and explain epidemiologic patterns. At different times, race stood for nationality, culture, skin tone, physicality, genetics, socioeconomics, and biochemistry.;The measurement of race moved from a bodily notion early in the century, to a postwar assessment which increasingly incorporated external characteristics, to an internal schema in the 1990s. In the 1920s, cancer's designation as a disease of civilization structured the search for etiology in ways that affected groupings of whites and nonwhites, as researchers compiling statistics on cancer rates in different populations rationalized and naturalized racial categories. Case studies of four cancers with racial associations examine how disease identities resulted from patterns of incidence, and in turn shaped research agendas and consolidated racial and ethnic borders. Skin cancer's stark racial disparities were poorly understood until the discovery of the carcinogenic nature of ultraviolet light, prompting researchers to classify subjects according to changing combinations of race, ethnicity, and skin color in their search for its causes. Varying associations of risk, race, and behavior marked studies into the etiology of cervical cancer; because of the disease's links with economic status and the correlation between race and class, race became a risk factor in that it appeared to determine the sexual practices which could affect incidence. Nasopharyngeal carcinoma's characterization as a disease of ethnic Chinese led scientists to pinpoint the specific traits which defined an individual as such, a list guided by racial ideology, stereotypically Chinese habits such as opium smoking, and a disregard for regional variations in Chinese culture. Finally, an examination of how prostate cancer became a "black" disease in the postwar U.S. reveals how new diagnostic technologies promote the illusion that race has an inherent biological basis, unsettling the prevailing social constructivist framework of race in ways that will have profound effects during the twenty-first century.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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History
