Article ID: CBB001420183

From Skid Row to Main Street: The Bowery Series and the Transformation of Prostate Cancer, 1951--1966 (2014)

unapi

Between 1951 and 1966, more than twelve hundred homeless, alcoholic men from New York's skid row were subjected to invasive medical procedures, including open perineal biopsy of the prostate gland. If positive for cancer, men typically underwent prostatectomy, surgical castration, and estrogen treatments. The Bowery series was meant to answer important questions about prostate cancer's diagnosis, natural history, prevention, and treatment. While the Bowery series had little ultimate impact on practice, in part due to ethical problems, its means and goals were prescient. In the ensuing decades, technological tinkering catalyzed the transformation of prostate cancer attitudes and interventions in directions that the Bowery series' promoters had anticipated. These largely forgotten set of practices are a window into how we have come to believe that the screen and radical treatment paradigm in prostate cancer is efficacious and the underlying logic of the twentieth-century American quest to control cancer and our fears of cancer.

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Authors & Contributors
Alexander Artikis
Eliana Piantanida
Nikos Katzouris
Ralf Klinkenberg
Nikos Giatrakos
Dimitrios Zissis
Concepts
Disease and diseases
Cancer; tumors
Therapeutic practice; therapy; treatment
Public health
Medicine
Prevention and control of disease
Time Periods
20th century
20th century, late
19th century
21st century
18th century
Places
United States
Argentina
India
Great Britain
Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
Americas
Institutions
American College of Cardiology
United States. Food and Drug Administration
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