Bathsheba's Breast by James Olsen

Your eye may glaze with familiarity at Rubens’s painting of Bathsheba, but a surgeon who looked at this painting saw what no one else had seen: that the model had breast cancer. James Olsen’s Bathsheba’s Breast (Johns Hopkins University Press, £11.50) offers a history of a disease feared and loathed. It is a potent reminder of what is good about modern medicine, from the first isolation of a gene associated with breast cancer by Mary-Claire King to the flood of genetic and pharmaceutical knowledge we now have.