San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Famed surgeon, breast health activist
Dr. Susan Love, a surgeon, author, researcher and activist who was for decades one of the world’s most visible public faces in the war on breast cancer, died Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 75.
The cause was a recurrence of leukemia, said Allie Cormier, chief marketing officer at the Dr. Susan Love Foundation for Breast Cancer Research.
Ubiquitous, energetic, forthright (some critics said brash) and at times controversial, Love, it was generally agreed, helped reshape both the doctor’s role and the patient’s with respect to the treatment of breast cancer, which kills more than 43,000 women in the United States annually.
A former faculty member at the medical schools of Harvard and UCLA, Love co-founded the National Breast Cancer Coalition, an advocacy group, in 1991. At her death, she was chief visionary officer of the Dr. Susan Love Foundation, a nonprofit organization that conducts and finances breast cancer research.
Although Love retired from active surgical practice in 1996, she remained influential through her writings, her lectures and her many television appearances.
She was known, in particular, for a book for lay readers, “Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book,” written with Karen Lindsey. Originally published in 1990 and now in its sixth edition, it has sold nearly a half-million copies and has long been a de facto bible for breast cancer patients.
She was a central figure in a well-received nonfiction
book, “To Dance With the Devil” (1997), an account by Karen Stabiner of the fight against breast cancer.
Love, who began her medical career as a general surgeon and had previously planned to be a Roman Catholic nun, realized early on that the fight against breast cancer would entail political as well as medical battles.
She did not suffer fools gladly, and her opinions often pushed against the tide of medical orthodoxy. In an era when surgeons were overwhelmingly male and deference by their female patients was still expected, she exhorted women to ask hard questions about their treatment.
Where tradition favored cutting, Love favored conservation. She frequently denounced a standard late 20th century treatment protocol — mastectomy, radiation and chemotherapy — as “slash, burn and poison,” instead advocating lumpectomy followed by radiation whenever possible.
“Wanting to keep your breast is not about vanity,” she said in an interview with Technology Review magazine in 1993. “It’s
about being intact as a person.”
After realizing as a young doctor that she was a lesbian, she chose to come out of the closet at a time when being openly gay carried grave professional and personal risks. She felt an obligation to do so, she said, so she could serve as a role model for others.
Her vision for breast cancer was no less expansive. What she ultimately wanted, she often said, was not so much to cure the disease as to vanquish it altogether by isolating its causes and preempting them at a cellular level.
As plain-spoken as Love could be in public, she was known for the immense private tenderness she displayed toward her patients. Many news-media profiles of her recounted her habit of standing alongside a patient just before surgery began, holding her hand and talking softly to her as the anesthesia took effect.
Susan Margaret Love was born in Long Branch, N. J., on Feb. 9, 1948.
She finished her bachelor’s degree at Fordham University, earned a doctor of medicine from the
Downstate College of Medicine of the State University of New York in 1974 and did her surgical residency at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. (She would also earn an master of business administration from UCLA in 1998.)
Acutely conscious of being a woman in a maledominated medical specialty, Love made a vow, she recalled in an interview with People magazine in 1994: “I am not going to let them turn me into a breast surgeon.”
“I could do the big operations just as well as they could,” she said.
But the breast patients came anyway, referred by male surgeons disinclined to take them on.
“I started to realize how women weren’t getting information,” Love told People. “If they came in with a lump or what they thought was a lump, the doctor would say, ‘Don’t worry your little head about that, dear.’ Most of these patients were scared to death. I realized I could make a contribution.”
Love is survived by her wife, Dr. Helen Sperry Cooksey, a surgeon, whom she married in San Francisco in 2004 during the brief period when samesex marriages were being performed there, before a California ballot proposition made them illegal in 2008. Also surviving Love is their daughter, Katie Patton-LoveCooksey, whose adoption in 1993 by her two mothers — Love was the biological mother; both women reared her from birth — was the first granted to a same-sex couple in Massachusetts. In addition, Love is survived by two sisters, Christine Adcock and Elizabeth Love, and a brother, Michael James Love.