"In A Darker Ribbon, Ellen Leopold looks closely at the relationship between women and their doctors and shows how sexual politics only recently have transformed the interactions between breast cancer patient and physician."--BOOK JACKET.

"At the heart of the book are two unpublished correspondences that dramatize the slow pace of change and the still-timely issues of patient disclosure, privacy, and informed consent. One is between a woman diagnosed with breast cancer eighty years ago and her surgeon, William Stewart Halsted, father of the radical mastectomy. The second features the letters of Rachel Carson, who was writing and defending her environmental classic Silent Spring as she was in the final stages of breast cancer.

These letters are invaluable women's health history, and a poignant and inspirational record of Carson fighting her way out of the role of compliant patient to become instead an advocate for herself, her own "case manager" in the days before such a phrase had ever been coined."--BOOK JACKET.