Susan M. Love

Susan M. Love (born 1948) feels that too many women succumb to breast cancer every year. A breast cancer specialist, Love believes women are losing control over their condition due to the male centered medical community.

Dr. Susan Love believes too many women fall victim to breast cancer each year. And just as disturbing, many of those women are further victimized by the male-dominated medical establishment, losing control of how their condition is treated. Love, a surgeon specializing in breast cancer, is out to change both issues.

A leading authority in her field, Love was director of the UCLA Breast Center, a haven for patients who come for consultation and treatment of the disease that ranks second only to lung cancer as America's leading killer of women. Love is also the author of Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book, a straightforward, no-nonsense and nontechnical look at the hows and whys of breast diseases.

"What drives Love in all this is more than a sense of urgency—she also has profound hope, believing that given adequate funds and intelligent research priorities, the fight against breast cancer can be won, and soon," commented Beth Horner in Technology Review. In an interview with Love, Horner noted that advice given to women about mammograms seems to change almost yearly. "The basic problem," replied Love, "is that no one quite understands the disease yet. We're just beginning to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, and as we do, doctors naturally find themselves reevaluating some of their recommendations."

But Love is certain of one thing: "Breast cancer does send incredible fear through women's hearts, but I don't think that's because it's had too much publicity. I don't even think it's entirely because breast cancer can be fatal." What keeps women fearful—even of examinations—is the prospect of a mastectomy, the removal of one or both breasts. "The breast," Love explained, "has some special psychological baggage—for one thing, there are all the associations of breastfeeding and nurturing the next generation. Then, too, the breast is the most obvious identifying feature of femaleness."

Another problem is that the doctor recommending treatment is invariably male. "Even when the patient has got over the shock of diagnosis, doctors can make it hard for her to come to a good, clear-headed decision about what kind of surgery she wants," Love told Horner. "They'll say things like, 'Well, you're elderly and you're widowed—you don't need your breast anymore. Why don't you just have a mastectomy? It'll be easier.' In my experience, though, older women aren't any more likely than younger ones to want a mastectomy."

Love has come by her insight as both a doctor and a woman. Ironically, the specialty she ended up with was not her first choice. In fact, "when Love became the first female general surgeon on staff at Boston's prestigious Beth Israel Hospital in 1980," Elizabeth Gleick stated in a People article, "she swore that she would not allow herself to get pigeonholed into women's medicine. 'I am not going to let them turn me into a breast surgeon,' she remembers thinking of her fellow doctors."

But the very fact that Love was a female surgeon in a medical field dominated by men led breast cancer patients to seek her out. As Love related in her book: "For any other form of surgery, they might have chosen, even preferred, a male doctor—but for breasts, they wanted someone they instinctively felt would understand their bodies and respect the particular meaning their breasts had for them. I soon realized that I could make a particular contribution in this area: I could combine my experience as a woman with my medical knowledge. I decided to specialize in breast problems."

In 1987 Love was appointed assistant clinical professor in surgery at Harvard Medical School; a year later she founded the Faulkner Breast Center, employing additional women as surgeons, oncologists, nurse specialists, radiologists, and more. Combining research with her political agenda, Love in 1990 cofounded the National Breast Center Coalition, an advocacy group dedicated to awareness of, and funding for, women's health issues.

With the publication of her book and the opening of the UCLA center, Love became a widely sought out figure. In People she detailed a schedule of surgery twice a week, lecturing to women's groups, and the frequent trips from her home base in California to Washington, D.C., to meet with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. Spare time is spent with the family—daughter Katie and Love's companion, Helen Cooksey, herself a surgeon. Love, who has made no secret of her sexual orientation, drew headlines in 1993 when Katie, born to Love of donated sperm, was jointly adopted by the two women—a ground-breaking custody case ensuring the pair will share full parental responsibility.

Having worked so extensively in the name of women's health, Love has some words of encouragement for those who have—or fear getting—breast cancer. "The first message I try to get across is that a diagnosis of breast cancer is not an emergency," she told Technology Review. "The typical notion is that you're a time bomb and the cancer is going to take over your body unless you do something tomorrow. Well, that's just not true. By the time they're diagnosed, most breast cancers have been around for years, which means it's unlikely that anything too dramatic will happen right away. You really do have a few weeks to research the subject, get second opinions, sort out your feelings and so on. I also think it's vital to treat women like intelligent human beings who are capable of all that."

In April 1996 Love announced her resignation from the UCLA Breast Center and received a position as professor of surgery at UCLA. She also published two more books on women's health. They include Dr. Susan Love's Hormone Book: Making Informed Choices About Menopause (1996) and To Dance with the Devil: The New War on Breast Cancer (1997).

Further Reading

Love, Susan, Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book, Addison-Wesley, 1990.

Love, Susan, Dr. Susan Love's Hormone Book: Making Informed Choices About Menopause, 1997.

Love, Susan, To Dance with the Devil: The New War on Breast Cancer, 1997.

People, July 25, 1994, p. 147.

Technology Review, May 1993, p. 45. □

LOVE, SUSAN M. 1948-

Surgeon

A Major Killer

"More women have died of breast cancer than people died in the Vietnam war," according to Dr. Susan M. Love. "Every four minutes a woman is diagnosed with it, and every twelve minutes a woman dies of it." Trained in Boston to be a general surgeon, Love became one of the most visible experts in the nation on breast cancer, a disease that affected one in ten American women and claimed 42,000 lives in 1988. Television viewers saw her on the PBS science program NOVA and on an ABC Nightline program about breast cancer. Breast cancer was a disease greatly feared by American women, and with her down-to-earth and forthright manner, Love provided a reassuring voice. She became famous for educating American women about their choices for cancer treatment as well as for her skill in performing surgery. A controversial figure in her field, Love was also well known for her views that were contrary to what many doctors advocated for treating breast cancer.

A Fascination with Science and Religion

The oldest of five children, Susan Love grew up in Puerto Rico and Mexico and attended Catholic schools run by the Sisters of Notre Dame. One of her junior-high schoolteachers became her mentor in her biology class and began her involvement in science. During her high-school years in Mexico City, Love was involved in National Science Foundation summer programs in Connecticut and New York. After two years at a women's college, Notre Dame of Baltimore, Love was drawn to the religious life of her teachers. She entered the Order of Notre Dame, hoping to become a nun "to do good works," and enrolled at Fordham University as a premed student. "It was the '60s, and we were all being relevant in one way or another," she pointed out. But six months after she became a postulant, she left the order after a consultation with her mentor convinced her that it "was the right thing to do."

Medical School

In the late 1960s when she applied to medical school, Susan Love ran into discrimination and the quota system for women applicants. At that time, many medical schools only admitted enough women to make up 5 percent of their classes. After applying to several East Coast schools, she was accepted at SUNY Downstate Medical College in Brooklyn, one of the 10 percent of the college admissions allotted to women that year. Since "all the women did well because we had to be better than the men to get in in the first place," Love graduated among the top five—all women—in her class of 225. When she began her surgical practice after a grueling five years of surgical residency at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, doctors began sending her breast-cancer patients since she was a woman surgeon. In 1981 she was appointed as surgical oncologist for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute Breast Evaluation Center. In 1988 the Faulkner Hospital offered her an appointment, and she set up a breast-cancer clinic run and staffed almost entirely by women.

A Feminist Physician

A good part of Love's fame lay in her criticism of the traditional treatment of breast cancer, which used major surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Love called this "slash, burn, and poison." In the 1980s controversies arose in the medical community over this treatment. In 1985 the New England Journal of Medicine published a study suggesting that simple removal of a woman's malignant breast lump and radiation treatment was as effective as the removal of her entire breast in treating early breast cancer. But many members of the medical community were slow to respond to this technique. Looking at the data from a feminist perspective, Love believed that lumpectomy along with other therapies was as effective as a total mastectomy. Her strongly worded criticisms of the medical establishment, whom she derided as "the boys," did not endear her to them, but her women patients found her comforting, safe, and reassuring. She placed a higher value on her role as a popular educator, rather than as an academic educator, since she felt that most women got their medical information from the media. Love believed her job was to be an educator, to teach her women cancer patients what they needed to make a choice about their cancer treatment. She authored a popular book, Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book; continued to educate the medical profession, collaborating with other surgeons on a breast-surgery textbook; and comforted her patients, telling them, "Surgery is a lot of ritual and a little science."

Sources:

Anita Diamant, "The Passion of Dr. Love," Boston Magazine (October 1988): 163+;

Elizabeth Gleick, "A Surgeon Crusades Against Breast Cancer," People (25 July 1994): 147+;

Susan M. Love with Karen Lindsey, Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990).