An MPhil/PhD study - Tom Lynch

I am currently undertaking an MPhil/PhD within the Institute of Health Research at Lancaster University, investigating the ways in which discourses of risk, surveillance, and responsibility may be inscribed upon the bodies of women who are ‘predisposed’ to developing female breast cancer. The thesis examines the advent of individual responsibility for the detection and prevention of female breast cancer from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. It explores the ways in which systems of surveillance identified healthy individuals perceived to be ‘at risk’ of developing illness and targeted them for specific health interventions. This shifted the emphasis towards individual responsibility for monitoring (and thereby preventing) illness through internal surveillance. The trajectory of breast cancer is tracked from stigmatised status to public discourse during the course of the twentieth century, locating the history of breast cancer within broader socio-cultural, political and medical discourses, and examining issues of social epidemiology and the promotion of further personal responsibility for the disease through increased ‘locus of control’. The concept of vulnerability to breast cancer through a ‘flaw’ in the biological makeup of certain women is explored by focusing on the idea of a ‘Type C cancer-prone’ personality at the latter end of the twentieth century. The linking of breast cancer with women’s psyche from the Greco-classical period onwards is also used to illuminate the issue. Genetic susceptibility to breast cancer through the identification of the BRCA gene is considered along with the many moral, philosophical, social and cultural issues that have arisen as a result of this new technology. The consequences of identifying the breast cancer gene in the form of prophylactic breast cancer intervention are also considered.