Death from breast cancer is rarely serene and beautiful. As a historian, I feel and have felt extremely uncomfortable relating the horrendous sufferings of these patients; yet I would feel equally uncomfortable omitting them, leaving my reader with the image of a sweet and pleasant death. Cancer in the breast was a greatly feared disease, and with good reason. It tortured the patients, often for years, by its pricking and darting pains, by ulceration, and by the slow progress of the disease in general.

The treatments of today's cancers are often described as barbarous, and I have oftentimes been reminded by today's cancer patients not to underestimate the horrendous, painful and nauseating nature of cancer medicine of our own day. Understanding this makes a scholar humble, and further helps us to understand the past realities: whatever the time of history, illnesses such as cancer are nothing but terrible. And it does not make sense comparing the experiences of patients from different centuries.

Eighteenth-century treatments of cancer were built upon ancient tradition, new ones were developed with the interest, I believe, of all humankind in mind: it was too well understood that cancer could, in fact, be an enemy to anyone, regardless of his or her status in the world or his or her way in the world. The eighteenth century saw new techniques in surgery, and many, I believe, greatly benefited from the early radical mastectomies, closing the wound at the first intention, or the newly recovered carrot poultice.