Dr. Susan Love, Surgeon and Breast Health Advocate, Dies at 75
Dr. Love is survived by her spouse, Dr. Helen Sperry Cooksey, a surgeon, whom she married in San Francisco in 2004 in the course of the temporary interval when same-sex marriages have been being carried out there, earlier than a California poll proposition made them unlawful in 2008. Also surviving is their daughter, Katie Patton-LoveCooksey, whose adoption by her two moms in 1993 — Dr. Love was the organic mom; each women reared her from delivery — was the primary granted to a same-sex couple in Massachusetts. In addition, Dr. Love is survived by two sisters, Christine Adcock and Elizabeth Love, and a brother, Michael James Love.
Today, about a quarter-million new cases of breast cancer are identified annually. Though the illness has a better survival price than prior to now, its trigger has not been recognized definitively, and the pre-emptive strike of which Dr. Love dreamed is but to be.
A way devised by Dr. Love, often known as ductal lavage, can display screen sufferers for an elevated threat of breast most cancers. Ductal lavage flushes out cells from the breast’s milk ducts, the place breast most cancers typically originates, in order that they could be analyzed for abnormalities that recommend an elevated threat of the illness. But the approach is cumbersome, time-consuming and costly, and it’s not extensively used.
Dr. Love’s different books embrace “Dr. Susan Love’s Hormone Book” (1997; with Ms. Lindsey), reissued in 2003 as “Dr. Susan Love’s Menopause and Hormone Book.”
If in the midst of her work Dr. Love antagonized some members of her career, that was, as she noticed it, a collateral consequence, if an inevitable one.
“One of the comments that I value the most came from one of my colleagues in Boston,” Dr. Love informed The Montreal Gazette in 1996. “He at all times considered me as being the child in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ the one who’s saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute, there’s no garments there.’ And that’s the function that I get pleasure from essentially the most.”
Maia Coleman contributed reporting.
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