“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the overall, then, violent shows provide a service, in that they usually promote the sense of a man’s or a woman’s individual power over a given set of circumstances. At best the public service announcements introduce the doctor as mediator: You are supposed to take your body to a doctor as you take your car to a garage, to have its parts serviced. Your body is seen as a vehicle out of control, that needs constant scrutiny.

All of our possessions were in Elmira. To convert to trailer living meant that we’d have to dispose of most of what we owned, including paintings and manuscripts, furniture, files, books, and many written records — something we probably couldn’t have brought ourselves to do. And how could we go to Florida and leave all of our friends, and how inconvenient would it be to deal with a publisher (Prentice-Hall) headquartered way up north in New Jersey? Jane was much more willing to attempt the move than I was, but I think we knew all along that beneath our questions and feelings the idea of moving was more like a shared dream, or a probable reality we chose not to explore during our current physical lives. Jane’s mother was to die within three months of our return home, mine over a year later (in November 1973).

Seth didn’t mention it in the session tonight, but Jane and I find it extremely interesting that just last week much national publicity was given to the ongoing two-year-old controversy among cancer specialists over whether women — especially those under 50 years of age — should be given routine mammograms (X-ray examinations) in efforts to detect breast cancer in its early stages.

Now, there’s much confusion on the part of women over whether to have mammograms. The process isn’t infallible, unfortunately; also, misinterpretations of its results have caused a number of cancer-free women to undergo mastectomies — often radical ones — when they didn’t have to. Moreover, each of these individuals has to live with the belief that they’ve had cancer, and must constantly be on the alert for any signs of its recurrence — signs they do not find. At the same time, they are subjected to even more X-ray examinations on a regular basis. They can also have insurance and employment problems (as can many other cancer patients).

A controversy related to that over mammograms, but one that hasn’t been nearly as well publicized, concerns “prophylactic subcutaneous mastectomy” — the process by which some women elect to have their breasts removed before they actually develop cancer in one or both of them. These women have been told that statistically they’re “high risk” prospects for cancer. Involved here are recent diagnostic procedures: the study of the “patient’s” family history, the study of the “density” and structure of her breast tissues as determined by mammogram patterns, and the detection of possibly premalignant cellular changes. In this preventative operation, the surgeon leaves the nipple and the skin of the breasts, and restores their bulk with implants of plastic or silicone.