New Book | Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth Century
In the U.S., October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and Friday, October 18th, is National Mammography Day. From the publisher:
Marjo Kaartinen, Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth Century (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1848933644, £60 / $99.
Early modern physicians and surgeons tried desperately to understand breast cancer, testing new medicines and radically improving operating techniques. In this study, the first of its kind, Marjo Kaartinen explores the emotional responses of patients and their families to the disease in the long eighteenth century.
Using a wide range of primary sources, she examines the ways in which knowledge about breast cancer was shared through networks of advice that patients formed with fellow sufferers. By focusing on the women who struggled with the disease as well as the doctors that treated them, much is revealed about early modern attitudes to cancer and how patients experienced – and were considered to experience – the cancerous body.
C O N T E N T S
Preface
‘One of the Most Grievous and Rebellious Diseases’: Defining, Diagnosing and the Causes of Cancer
2 ‘But Sad Resources’: Treating Cancer in the Eighteenth Century
3 Women’s Agency and Role in Choice of Treatment
4 ‘So Frightful to the Very Imagination’: Pain, Emotions and Cancer in the Breast
Epilogue
2013–14 Fellows at the YCBA and the Beinecke Library
A selection of 2014 Visiting Scholars at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven:
January 6 – January 31
Robert Wellington is an independent researcher and a casual academic in the Department of Art History and Film at the University of Sydney. He will pursue research for a project entitled “A War of Visual Histories: British Appropriations of French Triumphal Imagery at Marlborough House.” This project will provide the first in-depth account of Louis Laguerre’s cycle of paintings at Marlborough House, London, depicting the victories of the Duke of Marlborough against the French in the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Wellington’s research will involve an examination of prints and other material in the Center’s collections relating to Laguerre’s cycle.
February 3 – February 28
Henrietta McBurney Ryan is the Keeper of Fine and Decorative Art at Eton College. Her book project, Illuminating Natural History: The Art and Science of Mark Catesby, will present Catesby’s work as pioneering in a number of ways, including how it represents one of the last great pre-Linnaean enterprises. Among other things, this project will make extensive use of the Center’s unique collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drawing manuals and related treatises in order to further a discussion of Catesby’s techniques as an artist and his place in the history of natural history illustrators.
April 7 – May 2
Alexis Cohen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She will conduct research for a dissertation entitled “Lines of Utility: Outlines, Architecture, and Design in Britain, c. 1800.” Cohen’s project studies the proliferation of the outline drawing in British architectural and design publications and explores how neoclassical design discourses were shaped by notions of utility advanced in publications that privileged the outline drawing as a graphic idiom. Materials to be consulted include the Center’s rich collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architectural drawings by Robert Adam, C. R. Cockerell, A. W. N. Pugin, George Richardson, and James Wyatt, among others.
May 5 – June 27
Katelyn Crawford is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture, McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia. She will pursue research for her dissertation, “Transient Painters, Traveling Canvases: Portraiture and Mobility in the British Atlantic, 1750–1780.” Crawford’s project examines paintings by portraitists working within the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world in order to demonstrate the impact of mobility on artistic practice and portraiture on identity construction. Materials to be consulted at the Center include paintings, drawings, and prints by marine artists and portraitists whose practices further illuminate the connections between these genres and the culture of artistic mobility in the British Atlantic. The Center’s Rare Books and Manuscripts collection will also be explored for mention of itinerant portraitists in Britain and the Atlantic, and discussions of travel, mobility, and portrait production.
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A selection 2013–2014 Visiting Fellows at the Beinecke Library:
Thierry Rigogne (Fordham University), French Cafes in the Eyes of British Travelers, 1660–1800
Kathleen Lubey (St. John’s University), Marginal Conversations: Form and Feminism in Eighteenth-Century Textual Culture
Kevin Bourque (Southwestern University), Seriality, Singularity and Celebrity: Pictures in Motion from 1680 to 1810
Katherine Hunt (Birkbeck College, University of London), Shuffled Knowledge: Didactic Playing Cards in Early Modern Britain
Rupert Goulding (The National Trust, United Kingdom), William Blathwayt’s Acquisition of Goods and Materials from the Colonies for Use in Building and Furnishing Dyrham Park during the Late Seventeenth Century
Diana Barnes (University of Western Australia), The Politics of Emotion and Stoicism in the Writings of William Temple
Margaret Dalivalle, Osborn MS fb122 “Cooper Drawings”: A Technical Examination and Identification of the Models for an Important Group of Seventeenth-Century English Traced Drawings Deriving from the Studio of Richard Gibson, Miniaturist
Enfilade 
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