Agnes Arnold-Forster, "The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2021)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Aug 25, 2025 · 58m

Agnes Arnold-Forster's book The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2021) offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding the Middlesex Hospital in London. It follows in their footsteps as they walked the labyrinthine lanes and passages that branched off Tottenham Court Road; then, through seven chapters, its focus expands to successively include the rivers, lakes, and forests of England, the mountains…