A History of the Breast by Marilyn Yalom6/19/2023 According to feminists, self-examination was supposed to protect women from unnecessary medical interventions and become an empowering activity (however, this idea was soon questioned, cf. As a response to the perceived injustice and neglect, they started to encourage women to monitor the state of their breasts and to know their body in general (including finding pleasure in it). As a result of the fact that the doctors marginalized psychosocial needs of women and ignored their opinion, American feminists started to consider mastectomy as a tool of patriarchal oppression (cf. This is why it could happen that mastectomy was performed on women whose breasts had “only” fibrocystic changes. Moreover, surgeries were proceeded by practically no initial diagnostic tests, checking whether the “patient’s” lump is indeed a tumour. What is also important, not only was this “tradition” scientifically unjustified, it was even against the succeeding empirical outcomes. Surgical mutilation of women was a medical routine procedure for many decades.
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