For most of history, the voices of women with breast cancer have been silent, including the daughter of an American president. Fifty years ago, they began to speak.
While Bernie Fisher worked to change doctor’s minds, women demanded input into their care. Those whose lives are impacted by cancer continue to influence how doctors, including me, approach our patients and your treatment.
Less Radical is the story of Dr. Bernie Fisher, the surgeon-scientist who not only revolutionized breast cancer treatment, but also fundamentally changed the way we understand all cancers. He was an unlikely hero—a Jewish kid from Pittsburgh who had to make it past antisemitic quotas to get into med school. And the thanks he received for his discoveries? A performative, misguided Congressional hearing that destroyed his reputation and haunted him until his death.
Over six episodes, radiation oncologist Dr. Stacy Wentworth will take you into operating rooms, through the halls of Congress, and into the labs where breakthrough cancer treatments were not only developed, but discovered.
If you or someone you know has had breast cancer, Bernie is a part of your story—and you’re a part of his.
For photos, recommended readings, and show notes, visit Dr. Wentworth’s Substack, Cancer Culture.
Transcript
STACY WENTWORTH: In the last episode, we left off with Dr. Bernie Fisher getting a call to join a cancer research task force.
[THEME MUSIC IN]
We’ll get back to the lab next week. Today, we’re taking a little detour. We’re not talking about men in white coats—we’re talking about women.
I’m Dr. Stacy Wentworth, and this is Less Radical.
[SHOW OPEN MONTAGE]
BETTY FORD: I was terribly frightened about having breast cancer of course.
JUDY PEARSON: Women were terrified to go to their doctors if they found lumps.
BARNEY CRILE: So the academy did what I thought was the most immoral thing that an organized group of medicine had ever done.
ERMA BOMBECK: I have a name. I have a husband. I have a family.
RUTH HANDLER: When I lost my breast, it was as if I lost my femininity.
NANCY DAVIDSON: Bernie was changing everything.
BERNIE FISHER: The foundations of medical care must be based on science.
BERYL MCCORMICK: I think they really couldn’t change the way they thought, they just…couldn’t do it.
VINCENT DEVITA: You could see where they hated him because he wouldn’t give in.
[THEME MUSIC OUT]
STACY WENTWORTH: In the last episode, you also heard the story of Dr. William Halsted, the surgeon who pioneered the radical mastectomy in the United States. Our story today comes from the other side of the knife. And it starts more than 40 years before Halsted was born.
It’s 1810. Abigail Adams Smith, the oldest daughter of former President John Adams and First Lady Abigail Adams, feels a lump in her left breast. She’s 45 years old. Nabby, as she’s called, goes to the local healer in upstate New York. He tells her to put some hemlock paste on it. And, if she wants, she could even take some hemlock pills.
Nabby writes to her mother in Boston to see what the doctors there say. They also advise hemlock. It doesn’t work. The lump grows. A year later, the lump is now visible from the outside, pushing against her skin and even causing her pain.
So, in 1811, Nabby finally goes to see her parents outside Boston, where she has connections and comfort. It’s a 300-mile, multi-day trip from the New York frontier. It was a painful, bumpy ride over rough dirt and gravel roads—a trip that wasn’t pleasant no matter what condition you were in.
In Boston, Nabby wrote to Dr. Benjamin Rush. He was a friend of her dad, and he had signed the Declaration of Independence. Now, he was the nation’s leading physician. He wrote back:
TRACKED DR. BENJAMIN RUSH: “Let there be no delay in flying to the knife.”
[MUSIC]
STACY WENTWORTH: To wield that knife, the Adamses hired Dr. John Warren, a former Continental Army surgeon, and one of the founding faculty members of Harvard Medical School. When your dad is a founding father, the family friends tend to be notable.
I want to warn you, this next part is going to be graphic. In fact, this whole episode contains some difficult descriptions of surgery. If it’s a challenge to listen to it, just skip forward a couple of minutes.
In the upstairs bedroom of the Adams’ home, the family prepared for surgery. Nabby’s parents and sister-in-law were in the room. This was before the use of ether and anesthesia. Nabby was wide awake.
After strapping her to a reclining chair, Dr. Warren stabbed a two-pronged fork into Nabby Adams’s left breast and lifted it off her chest. With a knife in his other hand, he began slicing at the base of the breast. Warren and Nabby were soon both covered in her blood.
During the surgery, Dr. Warren found that the cancer had spread to the lymph nodes under her arm. He cut these out as well. The surgery lasted for about 25 minutes. Dr. Warren then pulled a red-hot spatula from the fireplace and pressed it into Nabby’s chest to cauterize her wound. The sound of sizzling filled the air and the smell of burning flesh followed. After more than an hour of dressing the wounds, Dr. Warren stepped back. The surgery was done.
Too weak to travel, Nabby spent the rest of the summer recovering at her parents’ house outside Boston. About seven months after the surgery, in the spring of 1812, Nabby returned to her husband and children in New York. But just a few months later, she was confined to bed with bone pain and terrible headaches. Today, we know these are the symptoms of cancer spreading and soon, so did Nabby. She told her husband she “wanted to die in her father’s house” and once again set out for Boston. Another hard, 300-mile ride.
In 1813, almost two years after her mastectomy, Nabby Adams died at age 48.
In reading accounts of this case, one observation comes up a lot. They say that Nabby never cried out during this bloody and unanesthetized surgery. That she was stoic. Bold. Brave. Quiet. Abigail Nabby Adams Smith—a model patient for doctors at the time.
This kind of brutal surgery continued for most of the rest of the century until Halsted introduced the radical mastectomy we covered in the last episode. But even as surgical practices changed, anesthesia advanced, and diagnostic tools improved, one thing was still missing from the operating rooms—women’s voices.
Thousands of women had brutal surgeries that didn’t completely remove cancer from their bodies. Thousands of women never even reported lumps in their breasts, bound by old ideas of “politeness” or perhaps afraid of the surgical treatment. But then, there were some women who didn’t stay quiet. They took a big risk and came out of the operating rooms and then went to newspapers, Congress, and the White House, to protests and demonstrations across the country to push for a voice in their cancer treatment.
ROSE KUSHNER: My name is Rose Kushner. In 1974, I was treated for breast cancer.
STACY WENTWORTH: Rose Kushner was a journalist. When she felt a lump, she treated it like one of her stories and started the way she always did—with research. She found one book at the library about breast cancer. It’s author was a surgeon named Barney Crile. The title: What Women Should Know About the Breast Cancer Controversy.
STACY WENTWORTH: Here’s Crile in a 1988 NOVA documentary talking about the history of surgery, describing what happened when he started to advocate for women:
BARNEY CRILE: So the academy did what I thought was the most immoral thing that an organized group of medicine had ever done. They criticized me for telling people that they could avoid an operation, and what the academy was trying to do is to suppress the information so more women would have radical mastectomies. And I couldn’t stand it.
[MUSIC]
STACY WENTWORTH: Crile’s book convinced Kushner to demand a two-step procedure, where the diagnostic biopsy and the mastectomy would be two separate operations. This is standard today, but as you heard in episode one, the vast majority of women in the 1970s were still undergoing a one-step procedure—they were put under, the doctor did a biopsy, and if it was cancer, performed the mastectomy while the woman was still out. Women would go in for surgery not knowing if they’d come out without a breast, unable to lift their arm, and doomed to suffer through chronic pain, swelling, and restricted movement. It was not uncommon for a woman’s arm to be amputated due to these complications.
Kushner insisted on being woken up after the biopsy, and her surgeon, thinking her lump wasn’t cancer, agreed. After the biopsy showed cancer, the surgeon rattled the bars of Kushner’s hospital bed, angry that he’d agreed not to go on with surgery. The nurse chided Kushner for upsetting the doctor. Kushner didn’t care. She wanted another opinion. Kushner wanted the choice–her choice of surgeon, and her choice to forgo the radical mastectomy. If only it were that easy. Rose Kushner called nineteen different surgeons before she found one who would agree to perform less than a radical mastectomy. Nineteen!
Finally, carrying her own pathology slides with her, Rose traveled from her home in Maryland to the Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Institute in Buffalo, where she got a modified radical mastectomy. Her frustrating experience led to what would become her life’s work–educating women about breast cancer, and the choices they had in their treatment. Here is Rose Kushner testifying before Congress in 1985.
ROSE KUSHNER: And after writing an article about my difficulties in finding state of the art diagnosis and treatment 11 years ago, I was asked to write a book about the disease.
STACY WENTWORTH: To educate herself and research her book, Rose Kushner traveled around the world and found that the U.S. was far behind when it came to breast cancer treatments. She learned that not only was a biopsy before surgery standard in England, Scandinavia, and Russia, but that the Halsted radical mastectomy was nowhere near as common in other countries as it was in the U.S.
There are a lot of reasons why Rose Kushner, or anyone, would want a biopsy before agreeing to a major surgery. Besides giving women time to prepare for a life-altering operation, or to get a second opinion, a biopsy gave doctors a signal that they would need to check elsewhere to see if the cancer had spread. Rose Kushner estimated that in the mid-1970s, 7,000 women a year were undergoing unnecessary radical mastectomies—unnecessary because like in Nabby Adams’ case one hundred and fifty years earlier, the disease had already spread beyond the breast, and a mastectomy wouldn’t be a cure.
[MUSIC]
While I was researching this story, I looked everywhere for photographs of women who had undergone a radical mastectomy. I searched for personal accounts of what it was like to see themselves in the mirror for the first time. How they zipped their dresses as they prepared to leave the hospital. What did their partners say? What did they tell their children?
A 1920 publication in the Annals of Surgery has a panel of six photographs of older women. Cloth bags cover their faces, the excess fabric gathering around their necks. Their chests are bare and each raises one arm in the air, exposing ragged black scars extending from above the armpit across the chest to just a few inches above the navel. One scar ends in the folds underneath the remaining breast as though thoughtfully hidden by her surgeon. The author, Dr. Willie Meyer, describes each woman as “alive and well” with “full use of their arm, able to assume the posture of the Statue of Liberty.” There are no comments from the women. Their presence without their voices startled me. If given the opportunity to talk, I wondered if these women would agree with Meyer’s conclusions that they were alive and well.
A 1950 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine features a photograph of an elderly woman sitting bare chested. Her pearl earrings and matching pearl choker reminded me of my late grandmother. The woman in the photo barely raises her swollen left arm, as if she’s greeting a friend. The scarred pocket of her left chest wall is overwhelmed by her large, pale right breast that remains. I can only imagine the months it took for this woman to regain the ability to move her arm this much, and the chronic, debilitating pain when she did. If she were fortunate, she’d have no feeling across her chest and down her arm.
And again, Kushner estimated seven thousand women a year went through this procedure when it was past the point of doing any good.
Kushner described a “vicious circle of surgical belief” around breast cancer. Judy Pearson, a writer whose upcoming book covers the women’s movement, healthcare, and Rose Kushner, says the disfiguring surgery and the fact that it wasn’t always an effective cure, added to the culture of silence.
JUDY PEARSON: Even though Rose and Betty Rollin and others were trying to bring attention to the situation in terms of the surgery, of not being afraid, women were terrified to go to their doctors if they found lumps, because, you know, it’s a death sentence. So they delay, and then the delay made it worse.
STACY WENTWORTH: There’s another advantage to a biopsy before surgery—one that benefits all women. A biopsy before surgery could allow women to enter into clinical trials. It gives doctors a set of patients to study who have breast cancer, but haven’t yet had surgery. This might sound small and technical, but it’s a big deal for medical research—you have to be able to study patients to know how the treatment is working. Without a biopsy first, the knife remained the cure.
When Kushner’s book, Breast Cancer: A Personal History and Investigative Report, was published in 1975, the ensuing controversy shot her into the public eye, establishing her as one of the first public breast cancer advocates. The New York Times Book Review described her book as “admirable,” “trustworthy,” and “provocative,” while also noting the American Cancer Society refused to recommend it to patients. The book flew in the face of long-standing surgical practice. One surgeon quoted in the Times piece called Kushner’s book “a piece of garbage.”
Kushner would press on. She and other survivors made breast cancer treatment part of the larger women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. Women wanted fair treatment in the workplace, equality at home, and breast cancer survivors like Kushner fought to give them a say in their health care, too.
Starting in the 1970s, many women spoke up about their diagnoses. Shirley Temple, the child actress-turned-diplomat, and then known as Shirley Temple Black, went public in 1972.
SHIRLEY TEMPLE BLACK: Well, I discovered a lump in my left breast just before I was due to go to Moscow as a delegate for the treaty that was signed between President Nixon and Chairman Podgorny last May. So I finished my work, came back, came in here last Wednesday, [a] week ago, and on Thursday morning, they did an excisional biopsy. And instead of good news, it was not good news. It was only something like two centimeters, the whole tumor in size, and a little tiny portion of that tumor was malignant, so the recommendation was by all the physicians and by my surgeon that the entire breast should be removed. So I signed the paper, and ever since the mastectomy has been done, I’m very relieved, very grateful, and I decided that I wanted to urge women in our country and any place in the world that if they have any strange lump in their breast or any symptoms to not be afraid, to go to the doctor and to get the diagnosis.
STACY WENTWORTH: Soul singer Minnie Riperton announced her mastectomy in 1976. Here she is on The Mike Douglas show the next year.
MINNIE RIPERTON: I’ve gotten incredible amounts of response from all kinds of people. Not only women, but a lot of men who really appreciated the whole thing.
MIKE DOUGLAS: Because it takes a lot of courage to talk about it, I think.
MINNIE RIPERTON: I guess so. I don’t know. I mean, I’m just myself. It’s hard to tell.
MIKE DOUGLAS: You know, millions of people are listening to you just say it.
MINNIE RIPERTON: It’s true, you’re right.
[MUSIC]
STACY WENTWORTH: Riperton even did a PSA in 1979 encouraging women to examine their breasts.
[MUSIC]
[RECORD SCRATCH]
MINNIE RIPERTON: It happened that abruptly. I got cancer. I lost a breast.
STACY WENTWORTH: Riperton’s outspokenness was especially notable because she was one of the only Black women in the U.S. to speak out about breast cancer this publicly. In part, because she was one of the only Black women to have such a large platform. Prior to her openness, messaging around cancer screenings and prevention were largely aimed at white women.
MINNIE RIPERTON: And I saved the rest of my life because I examined myself early. Now I’m healthy. I picked up my life where I left off.
[MUSIC]
STACY WENTWORTH: Sadly, Riperton’s cancer had already metastasized by the time this PSA aired. She died that same year at age 31, leaving behind an 11-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter—future SNL star Maya Rudolph.
Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, women continued to speak up. Columnist and author Erma Bombeck wrote and spoke about her diagnosis.
ERMA BOMBECK: Because I have a name. I have a husband, I have a family, I have this little part time job. And I have an incredible will to live. On April the 23rd of this year, I had two things on my calendar. I had to get a birthday present for my son, Andy. And I had to get my teeth cleaned at two o’clock. Well, I crossed both of them out and I penciled in “Radical Mastectomy, 12:30 pm.” As I sat in the doctor’s office, and heard the news, I don’t know why, but I thought of all those lunches and those dinners I had gone to where they slapped a nametag over my left chest. And I always looked down and said, “Oh, that’s wonderful. Now what shall we name the other one?” And that would no longer be a problem for me. Of course, humor helps.
STACY WENTWORTH: The creator of Barbie talked about her mastectomy.
CONNIE CHUNG: Ruth Handler had a mastectomy in 1970.
RUTH HANDLER: I had been fighting to be a respected female executive all my life and when I lost my breast, it was as if I had lost my femininity.
Oh you came looking for me! Am I late? [FADES UNDER]
CONNIE CHUNG: Handler got a breast prosthesis, and then out of adversity, an idea about artificial breasts.
STACY WENTWORTH: As she explains in that CBS interview, Ruth Handler used her experience to make a prosthetic breast designed for women by a woman.
[MUSIC]
One reason so many people could talk openly about their diagnosis was because of famous patients like these. And like First Lady Betty Ford, whose story we heard in the first episode of this series. Here she is talking about it in 1997, at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library.
BETTY FORD: I was terribly frightened about having breast cancer, of course. But I also knew that the only way I could handle it, was, this illness, was to be totally open and honest with the public. Women did not usually talk about mastectomies or breast cancer at that time, it was kind of a behind the closed door as far as any discussion.
STACY WENTWORTH: After Ford shared her story, doctors saw an uptick in women asking about breast cancer, and seeking exams. They called it the “Betty Bump.”
BETTY FORD: But by speaking out public about it, it not only eliminated any speculation about why I was going to be laid up in the hospital for some time, but it had a much, much greater impact. And that benefit was it got hundreds of thousands of women to their doctors, and to clinics for breast exams.
[MUSIC]
STACY WENTWORTH: What these women weren’t always told, though, was that they had options. At the time, doctors didn’t have to tell women they could get a biopsy first. They didn’t have to share options for mastectomies. Women weren’t consulted at all on their care.
In her book, Rose Kushner writes about the night she found out about Betty Ford’s decision to get a radical mastectomy. Kushner called the White House and begged a speechwriter to ask the President to consider a biopsy first. When the man returned to the phone, he said only, “the President has made his decision.”
These famous cases led to more women getting care, but it wasn’t always the care they needed. Thousands of women reported lumps. Thousands of lives were surely saved. But thousands of women received mastectomies they didn’t need, too. Thousands died of metastatic disease that wasn’t caught in time. Thousands lived lives with scars, disfigurement, and pain. Thousands were stoic and silent throughout their treatment. Thousands of Abigail “Nabby” Adams Smiths.
I want to share one more story. It’s a story I’m close to.
LOUISE GRAPE: I don’t remember the idea or a conversation about cancer not being part of my life.
STACY WENTWORTH: When Louise Grape was a child in the 1970s, her mother Myrna Hirsch was diagnosed with breast cancer.
LOUISE GRAPE: And so I remember sitting in Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey, with my mom across the room, squinting her eyes as they were putting the needles to draw her blood, do all this stuff.
STACY WENTWORTH: Her mom had a radical mastectomy.
LOUISE GRAPE: I remember asking my mom to see her scars, and she had, oof, wicked, it was wicked, looking at that. And I as a kid, I was like, wow, that’s intense, you know.
She decided, she bought a bikini. And when we’d go to the lake, which was not far from us, you know, everybody went to Darlington Park, you know, a man-made lake, and go swimming and stuff. And yeah, you could see it from here. And beyond her bikini top, and she went for it. I thought that was cool as hell.
STACY WENTWORTH: The cancer returned. Myrna Hirsch learned to drive so she could take herself to radiation appointments. But after repeat hospitalizations, Louise knew the inevitable was coming for her mother.
LOUISE GRAPE: One day, I remember my dad coming down the elevator. And he, he called me over and he said you can come upstairs this time. And I was like, oh, okay, and when I got up there, I immediately, when we looked in her room. And I think when you’re I think when you’re little you definitely have intuition. And you’re not, you don’t really have knowledge yet to be afraid of something, because it’s just oh, there it is. Something’s very wrong. You know, and that was my impression immediately. Immediately, that she, this was not good.
And driving home that night in the car. I just remember, it was dark. And you know, it was our like 1963 Plymouth Valiant my father was driving, you know. And I just looked at him. And I said, “Mom’s going to die, isn’t she?” Just like that. And my dad lost it, he pulled the car over to the side of the road, and he was crying so hard. And I just sat there, like, looking at him. And when he could compose himself, all he said was, “We’re going to need a miracle.” And that was it.
STACY WENTWORTH: Years later, Louise was diagnosed herself. And she thought about her mom’s experience.
LOUISE GRAPE: So having had to have, you know, a mastectomy myself later. I mean, I’m glad it wasn’t quite like that. But it’s still not what it could be. (laughs) It could be better!
STACY WENTWORTH: Driven by both her own experience, and to honor the memory of her mother, Louise started a nonprofit called Hirsch Wellness, which hosts support programs for cancer patients and survivors. Fourteen years ago, the chaplain at the cancer center where I work invited me to attend one of their meetings. It was meant to help patients transition back to life after cancer. It was my first support group, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.
In that church basement, my eyes were opened to what happened once cancer treatment was supposedly over. Sitting in a circle on mismatched folding chairs, a dozen or so survivors shared their joy, hope, fear, dreams, tears, gratitude, and frustration.
I left the meeting radicalized. I say I went to the meeting reluctantly because I never intended to get caught up in cancer survivorship.
[MUSIC]
It’s the last place you’d think to find a super-specialized, process-driven radiation oncologist like me. But I realized after that meeting, that cancer doesn’t end after the last treatment is over, the patient rings a bell, or your hair grows back. Even if you live through it, cancer changes your life forever.
After that meeting in the church basement, I started noticing what my patients were saying. Radiation usually is the end of a lot of cancer treatments, and I started to hear patients talk about the feelings of cancer catching up to them. They noticed that they were feeling more tired, that they were crying more, and yet they feel a pressure to be “on,” or to be the perfect cancer patient, or that everyone back in their “normal life” is going to expect it to be over once they walk out that door.
I heard a survivor, Adam Mark, explain it this way. He says, “Cancer may not be a death sentence, but it is a life sentence.”
We have this curve that we use in cancer treatment, and it’s called the cell survival curve. And what you want to do is kill just enough of the patient to kill all of the cancer cells. You want to bring a patient to the edge, because you know over the edge, the cancer cells can’t repair the damage that we’re doing. In the midst of intense cancer treatment, patients can’t really focus on side effects. It’s only at the end of treatment, as the crowds fall away, as we as their medical team fall away, that patients start to really feel the impact of what’s happened to them, both physically and emotionally.
The time after cancer treatment sometimes kind of sucks. And I began to start seeing that patients needed a safe place to have that conversation. And so, along with a wonderful medical team, I began building a safe place for patients to go back to the beginning, to hear about their diagnosis, their treatment, and to hear things that they could do to help recover from their cancer treatment. To start thinking about the future.
My patients inspire me. Their stories inspire me. Their voices drive the work that I do. It’s taken a long time for women to have a say in their treatment, and for doctors to listen to them.
Activists like Kushner led a push to require doctors to give women a say. Laws would soon make this mandatory in many states. But the treatment options needed to advance, too. And that meant we needed a better understanding of the disease.
That understanding would come from Bernie Fisher.
[MUSIC]
Now, Bernie was no Gloria Steinem. He didn’t set out to dismantle the surgical patriarchy. He wasn’t interested in breast cancer until Dr. Ravdin called him to join a task force about it. And even then, the search for treatments for breast cancer wasn’t all about women’s liberation. In a lot of ways, preventing breast cancer, or at least making the treatment less debilitating, would preserve the nuclear family. And despite Minnie Riperton’s advocacy, cancer education efforts in the 1970’s and 80’s focused mainly on middle-class white women and stay-at-home mothers. Breast cancer was common, visible, and the current treatments left these women unable to perform wifely duties.
But Bernie’s work couldn’t have had the impact it did without the women’s movement. He provided the data that women cited in their protests. He scolded surgeons who refused to give up the brutal old ways. The drive to preserve the patriarchy, to keep the surgeon as the king of his domain, silenced not only women’s voices, but it closed surgeons’ minds to new treatments.
Bernie Fisher recognized the importance of women’s voices. In 1992, he spoke in a Congressional hearing after three women detailed the challenges of speaking up to raise awareness about breast cancer.
BERNIE FISHER: And I can only assure that these were not three women talking but they represent thousands and thousands of women who have their same kind of stories which I’ve heard over these years.
STACY WENTWORTH: And in a talk in 2011, Bernie thanked women again. But this time, he focused on the women who didn’t have a big public platform. Instead, it was the women who helped him with his research. Who trusted him enough to enter his studies. The women who were truly responsible for the trials that would change the world.
BERNIE FISHER: Well, from time to time I did receive from women and their family members letters of gratitude and frequently contributions, not often big ones, to my research. I was very pleased. But more importantly, I was, and continue to be grateful for the women who consented to participate in my studies of clinical trials. And they’re the real heroes of all of that. The findings from those trials resulted in improved treatment for women who participated, and ultimately for all women.
[MUSIC]
STACY WENTWORTH: Next week, you’ll hear how Bernie became focused on breast cancer in the first place, and how he changed our understanding of all cancers with a major discovery.
VINCENT DEVITA: And along comes Bernie Fisher and tells them that they really don’t need all that surgery, that you get the same results with lumpectomy and radiation therapy, and that, you know, the lid blew off. His own colleagues were trying to kill him.
STACY WENTWORTH: Less Radical is produced by me, Stacy Wentworth, and the team at Yellow Armadillo Studios: Melody Rowell, Gabe Bullard, and Sam Gebauer.
Fact checking is by Ryan Alderman. Our artwork is by Arianna Egleston. And we get marketing support from Tink Media. Music is from Epidemic Sound.
Special thanks to Judy Pearson, Vince DeVita, Louise Grape, Terry Moore Painter, and Omar Asfar.
It’s October, which means it’s Breast Cancer Action Month. And that means you’re probably seeing pink everywhere. And that, combined with today’s episode, it’s a lot. If you want to share your reactions and continue the conversation, join me in the discussion thread for this episode at cancerculture.substack.com. There, you can also see extensive show notes for Less Radical, including photos and links to read more about Bernie Fisher and the history of breast cancer. That’s cancerculture.substack.com. You can follow me on Instagram at drstacywentworth.
And be sure to follow or subscribe to Less Radical in your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss a single chapter of Bernie’s story. While you’re there, please leave us a five star review.
Thanks for listening.
