Dr. Susan Love, surgeon and breast health advocate, dies at age 75
Dr. 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 same-sex marriages were performed there, before a California ballot made them illegal in 2008. in 1993 — dr. Love was the birth mother; both women raised her from birth – was the first to be awarded to a same-sex couple in Massachusetts. In addition, Dr. Love was survived by two sisters, Christine Adcock and Elizabeth Love, and a brother, Michael James Love.
About today a quarter of a million new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed every year. While the disease has a higher survival rate than in the past, the cause has not yet been definitively identified, and the preemptive strike Dr. Love dreamed, has yet to take place.
A technique invented by Dr. Love, known as ductal lavage, can screen patients for an increased risk of breast cancer. Ductal lavage flushes cells from the milk ducts of the breast, where breast cancer often originates, so they can be analyzed for abnormalities that indicate an increased risk of the disease. But the technique is cumbersome, time consuming and expensive and is not widely used.
Other books by Dr. Love include “Dr. Susan Love’s Hormone Book” (1997; with Mrs. Lindsey), reissued in 2003 as “Dr. Susan Love’s Menopause and Hormone Book.”
If, in the course of her work, Dr. Love antagonized some members of her trade, it was, as she saw it, a byproduct, albeit inevitable.
“One of the comments I appreciate most came from one of my colleagues in Boston,” Dr. Love in 1996 to The Montreal Gazette. ‘He always saw me as the child in’The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the one who says, “Hey, wait a minute, there are no clothes there.” And that’s the part I like the most.”
May Coleman reporting contributed.