When Theory Meets Experience: An Anthropological Perspective on Cancer

In June 2020 – amid the COVID-19 pandemic – I received phone call from a doctor as he drove between appointments informing me that I had breast cancer. With little preamble, he delivered life-altering information that would fundamentally reshape my understanding of my own body, my future, and place in the world. In that moment I experienced a crisis of correspondence. Not correspondence as a definition communication between two people¹ but rather the correspondence we have between our conscious and unconscious selves that correspond and craft the narrative of our lives. A crisis of correspondence therefore, is an abrupt shift that seems to cleave one's life narrative into distinct eras - the pre and the post. This crisis of correspondence is particularly acute in medical contexts, where technical knowledge and lived experience often struggle to align.

The Problem of Medical Vision

A cancer diagnosis transforms not just the body but one's entire way of knowing and being in the world. As a newly diagnosed cancer patient you are drowning in a miasma of technical knowledge and jargon that, until recently, was foreign to you. Clinicians spend years learning what they are then attempting to convey to you over a handful of appointments. This asymmetry in medical knowledge - between those who have spent years immersed in its language and those suddenly forced to learn it - reveals something fundamental about how medical understanding develops. In 1911 naturalist J. Arthur Thomson wrote:

When we work long at a thing and come to know it up and down, in and out, through and through, it becomes in a quite remarkable way translucent… so the human body becomes translucent to the skilled anatomist.

(Thomson cited in Ingold 2016:63)

Thomson's observation remains startlingly relevant over 100 years later. With any diagnosis - particularly cancer - a doctor sees through you, not just through modern medical imaging but through the lens of their own medical education and experience. This is by no means a criticism - good clinicians are ones who can turn down the volume to the superfluous. The experience and education they bring then opens pathways for diagnostic testing. But this same education and experience may also serve as blinders which obfuscate what lies beyond what they expect to see.

This medical translucence can have profound implications. At the age of 34, my breast cancer diagnosis placed me far from the typical breast cancer patient. Multiple clinicians initially dismissed my presentation of a visible lump as insignificant – not through negligence, but through such familiarity with how cancer typically presents. I existed outside their frame of reference, yet firmly within cancer's reality. This paradox illuminates a deeper truth about medical vision: what becomes translucent to the clinical gaze can sometimes obscure what lies outside expected parameters.

The challenge extends beyond diagnosis to the very way we understand illness. The problem of how to live and how to heal, and the felt chasm between knowing the world and being in it, seem as inscrutable as cancer itself. While viewing a cancer diagnosis as a rupture – a sharp demarcation between before and after – holds intuitive appeal, it proves inadequate when confronted with illness's intricate reality. As Anthropologist Tim Ingold (2020:90) suggests, experiences cut deep rather than becoming overlaid when he writes:

The past, then, is visible only by way of the translucence of the present. But the logic of the palimpsest teaches us otherwise. It tells us that with the passage of time, layers are not added but worn away, and that to mark them up means cutting deep.

This insight raises a crucial question: how can we reconcile these deep cuts to our lifeworld? In Genzaburo Yoshino's aptly titled novel How Do You Live? he suggests: ‘we must find a way to draw knowledge from all our suffering and sadness!’ The question then becomes not just whether we can identify these transformative moments, but how we might learn from them.

Most adults possess the cognitive and emotional skills to recognise and define traumatic incidents - an advantage over children, who, as Alisic et al. (2011) note, ‘might appraise threatening situations in a different way because their frame of reference is less clearly defined’. Yet merely identifying these ruptures isn't enough. The real challenge lies in finding ways to draw meaningful knowledge from experiences that fundamentally alter how we see ourselves and our world.

The Resistant Body

The paradox of visibility/invisibility in cancer diagnosis directly challenges medicine's presumed translucence. While Thomson's skilled anatomist sees through the body with practiced ease, the living body refuses such simple transparency. Medical imaging technologies attempt to render the body translucent - mammograms and MRIs searching for anomalies on what should be an unremarkable internal map. Even a chest x-ray reveals this tension: the lungs and heart become mere background, their living function secondary to the search for aberrations.

This attempted translucence meets its greatest resistance in radiation therapy. Here, my body became a site of measurement and marking – permanent tattoos and laser-guided measurements attempting to transform flesh into coordinates. Yet the marked surface of my body refused to become a passive canvas for medical inscription. Each breath shifted the landscape they attempted to map, every heartbeat altered terrain meant to remain static. My living body quietly rebelled against its reduction to geometric planes and measurement points.

The marked surface of my body resisted becoming a passive canvas for medical inscription

The embodied tension was particularly evident during initial radiation planning. The radiation oncologists worked to transform curved, living tissue into flat geometric planes suitable for treatment. They took x-rays, using my ribs and collarbones as internal landmarks to supplement the external tattoos marking my skin. While the machinery whirred and rotated around me, I felt nothing – yet this apparent absence of sensation belied the profound transformation occurring. My body existed in two states simultaneously: as a technical object requiring precise positioning, and as a living, breathing entity that refused to be fully captured by medical vision.

Looking back, I realise this duality characterised much of my treatment experience: feeling physically present yet somehow removed from normal embodied experience. In this way, my body's resistance to medical inscription wasn't just physical – it was epistemological. It challenged the very way medicine claims to know and see through the body. Medical imaging creates new ways of seeing our bodies, treatment protocols establish new routines and rhythms, and our relationship with time itself shifts dramatically. These aren't simply changes imposed from outside but transformations in how we correspond with our world - the very dialogue between being and environment. The body's resistance reveals the limits of medical translucence, suggesting that truly effective treatment must learn to see with, rather than merely through, the patient.

When Doctors Become Patients

This tension between seeing ‘through’ and seeing ‘with’ becomes particularly evident when medical practitioners find themselves on the other side of the stethoscope. The gap between technical knowledge and lived experience creates its own form of translucence, as doctors who become patients often find themselves baffled that their medical knowledge is not protective in the way they assumed. In a post on r/ausjdocs² post one doctor reflected on this after a lengthy hospital stay when he writes:

The hospital is boring as an inpatient. So boring. I understand why patients DAMA [discharge against medical advice] now. Especially when they’re getting daily bloods without explanation. I understand the rationale for daily bloods and even I was getting bloody tired of constant stabs.

(Reddit user: DefinitelyIVDU, 2025)

Despite – or perhaps because of – their medical knowledge, they found themselves navigating the same disorienting territory as their patients. This illustrates how the medical gaze, focused on gathering data points, can sometimes see through the person being treated.

Toward a New Understanding

The crisis of correspondence that begins with a cancer diagnosis - that rupture between our conscious and unconscious selves - never fully resolves. Instead, it opens into what anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes calls a “total social fact”: something that simultaneously transforms every dimension of human experience. Cancer reaches beyond cells and bodies to reshape relationships, routines, identities, and ways of understanding the world. It affects how we work, how we relate to others, how we think about time, and even how we understand ourselves.

This transformation becomes particularly evident when medical practitioners become patients themselves. As one doctor discovered during their own hospitalisation, technical knowledge provides no shield against the disorienting reality of illness. Their reflection - ‘I think this event has made me a better clinician... I get to compare my PICC and CVL scars with the cancer patients in ED. It's made some of them laugh’ - reveals something profound about how illness transforms ways of knowing. The doctor's scars become not just markers of medical procedures but points of connection, challenging the presumed translucence of the medical gaze.

These moments of accidental anthropology - whether through patients wrestling with medical inscription or practitioners discovering the limits of their technical knowledge - reveal how anthropological thinking naturally emerges when we try to make sense of illness. The body's resistance to becoming a mere set of coordinates, the inadequacy of traditional metaphors of battle or journey, the way medical knowledge transforms through lived experience - all these point to the need for new ways of understanding illness.

Rather than trying to resolve these tensions - between technical precision and lived experience, between seeing through and seeing with, between knowledge and being - anthropological thinking suggests we might work productively within them. Just as Ingold argues that experiences cut deep rather than becoming overlaid, perhaps we need to understand cancer as a process of continuous correspondence between different ways of knowing. The crisis that begins with diagnosis doesn't end in resolution but opens into new ways of corresponding with our bodies, our medical practitioners, and our transformed understanding of the world.

This perspective offers no easy answers but something potentially more valuable: a way of thinking that embraces both the precision of medical knowledge and the messy reality of lived experience. It suggests that healing involves not just medical intervention but finding new ways to correspond with our altered reality. The doctor comparing scars with patients isn't just sharing war stories - they're engaging in this correspondence, discovering how medical knowledge transforms when filtered through lived experience.

In the end, the anthropological lens reveals something crucial about illness: it is never just about bodies, or knowledge, or experience, but about how all these elements correspond and transform each other. The challenge isn't to resolve the tensions between different ways of knowing but to learn to move within them, finding new ways to correspond with our transformed reality. This might not heal the initial rupture of diagnosis, but it offers a way to make meaning from it, drawing knowledge from our suffering and sadness in ways that transform both medical practice and patient experience.

References

Alisic E, Boeije HR, Jongmans MJ and Kleber RJ (2011) ‘Children’s Perspectives on Dealing With Traumatic Events’, Journal of Loss and Trauma, 16(6):477–496, doi:10.1080/15325024.2011.576979.

DefinitelyIVDU. (2024, February). ‘Perspectives from the other Side - some thoughts after a 3 week admission...’. Reddit, r/ausjdocs. https://www.reddit.com/r/ausjdocs/comments/1innttg/perspectives_from_the_other_side_some_thoughts/

Ingold, T (2016) Lines: A Brief History, Kindle Edition, Taylor & Francis Group, London, United Kingdom.

—— (2020) Correspondences, Kindle Edition, Polity Press, Newark, United Kingdom.

Thomas J (2007) ‘The trouble with material culture.’, Journal of Iberian Archaeology, 9(10):11–23.

Yoshino G (2021) How Do You Live?, B Navasky (tran), Random House.

1. Although I wouldn’t necessarily categorise telling someone they have cancer via speaker phone as best practice.

2. A subreddit for Australian and New Zealand junior doctors.