“They had a 61 percent response rate, and at the end of two years had surveyed 8,750 homes. In the course of their research, they created a 10-foot long map of West Islip on Pace’s kitchen table, pinning yellow highlighted squares on it to represent the breast cancer cases identified through the survey, pink squares for benign tumors and blue squares where there were no tumors.” in “Breast Cancer on Long Island” by Lis Diedrich and Emily Boyce page 202.
I was struck by the amount of time and effort that it took the ordinary citizens featured in this article to collect and map the data of breast cancer victims. This quote really conjured an image of the kitchen table with this extensive and important map, and particularly that type of lab compared with a white coat “real” lab. I searched for news coverage regarding this history to maybe find a photo of the table and/or the map they created, and in the New York Times this was the only coverage that had an image accompanying the story that I was able to find. (The article can be found here). I was a bit surprised that even though this article and others talk about the mapping, there is not one clear photo of the actual map. Maybe I should not have been surprised, why would an institution like the New York Times actually want to help these women?
--SCT
