ABSTRACT
For a medical anthropologist, to borrow from Lévi-Strauss, cancer is good to think with. As Mathews and Burke emphasize in their introduction to this volume, cancer is both one and many conditions—over 100 different cancers exist in humans in diverse organs and tissues. These cancers are characterized by abnormal cell growth—cells failing to die, or growing when they are not needed, replicating, acquiring mass, invading other tissue and spreading to other parts of the body. With cancer, the normal process of cell regeneration is out of control; cancer is invasive and corrosive. Without effective intervention, cancers are fatal, hence the fear around them.
