Coping with illness was the subject of a popular memoir, “First, You Cry.” In “Last Wish,” a best seller, she wrote about helping her mother end her life. She chose to end her own life as well. By ...

Women who had undergone disfiguring surgery for breast cancer, according to one surgeon in the 1970s, needed to “stick an old sock in their bra and get on with their lives.” It was this climate that ...