#they'll claim that a historical figure definitely died of breast cancer when in reality her diagnosis was unknown | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

smol-blue-bird · 11 months ago

Text

I'm taking a course on breast cancer in literature (for my medical humanities minor) and it is genuinely insane how many historical myths this class is just casually perpetuating. I'm stuck in an endless cycle of reading a book/handout, stumbling onto a passage about historical medicine, noticing some kind of discrepancy that makes me think "hmmmmm, that doesn't sound right," and looking it up to discover that my instinct was correct and the book was wrong or misleading. This has happened three times and it's the first week of the semester! This class is going to kill me

#usually the books aren't straight-up WRONG so much as they're misleading or half-right #they'll claim that a historical figure definitely died of breast cancer when in reality her diagnosis was unknown #they also repeat a lot of apocryphal stories without specifying that they're apocryphal #so they aren't making things up but they're definitely not doing their due diligence #I don't want to be that obnoxious student who thinks they're smarter than the professor but I am really hating this

4 notes · View notes