Criticism of conventional medicine is often regarded as a product of the 1960s. Before then, "scientific medicine" enjoyed uncontestable cultural prestige, with kindly but strict doctors wielding unquestioned authority over grateful patients while "quacks" flogged dubious remedies to the poor and credulous - or so go popular perceptions and - for the most part - received scholarly wisdom. But the very nature of cancer - mysterious, capricious, and deadly - challenged medical authority in the past as much as it does today, and in Negotiating Disease Barbara Clow lays to rest old assumptions about the monopoly of health care by doctors in the first half of the twentieth century.