Beauty Without the Breast

Beauty without the Breast is a personal testimony of life with cancer, and at the same time both an appeal to the importance of the voice of women in securing better health and a call-to-action for expanded access to care and control in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). Felicia Knaul has dedicated her professional life to health and social development. After diagnosis in 2007 with breast cancer, she merged the personal with the professional to document her experience in a work that transmits her own journey. The story at once contrasts her difficult but inspiring experience with that of the majority of women throughout the world who face not only the challenge of the disease but also stigma, discrimination and lack of access to health care. This wrenching contrast is the cancer divide an equity imperative in global health. Beauty without the Breast lays bare many of the barriers that affect women in all parts of the world and highlights the role of men, the family and the community in responding to the challenge of breast cancer. The author candidly addresses through her own experience, issues of survivorship and life with the long-term effects of treatment and the chronic nature of the disease.It is also a call-to-action that brings to light the unforeseen challenge to health and health systems of breast cancer in LMICs. Felicia, a health economist by training who has lived and worked for two decades in Latin America, also shares her journey as a professional in developing a better understanding of the burden of this disease and demonstrating the need to develop more effective policies to meet this challenge. The book is a rare combination of the personal and professional that moves the reader from the anecdote of a woman who lives the disease, to the striking epidemiological evidence about breast cancer a leading killer of young women throughout the developing world. The book narrates the process of applying this evidence to developing and launching a program Tomatelo a pecho (the title of the book in Spanish) and today a registered charitable organization based in Mexico and dedicated to increasing awareness and expanding access to early detection and treatment of cancer.The book includes a series of letters to Felicia from her husband Dr. Julio Frenk, former Minister of Health of Mexico and Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, written to her as they shared the trauma of treatment.Few books transmit with such force and lucidity the journey of the patient, partner, family and health system with a chronic disease. The process of learning to understand and embrace illness are detailed with deep sensitivity to express the immense love of life and the courage of a woman to overcome adversity.