Open-access Beyond biomedical classifications: breast cancer experience in Brazil, 1990-2015

Abstract

The paper analyses illness experiences of breast cancer in women undergoing treatment at the Hospital of Cancer III of the National Institute of Cancer. It argues that part of the interviewed women’s experience was constructed from the interaction between family coexistence and the mobilisation of different cultural meanings of the disease and femininity, negotiating senses for biomedical entities. The study results from a qualitative research of ethnographic inspiration that interviewed women undergoing treatment from breast cancer during 2015. It draws on the accounts to discuss the interaction of society with biomedical entities for the significance of cancer in Brazil between the 1990s and 2010s.

breast cancer; illness experience; biomedicine; Brazil; history

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