Rose Kushner

Rose Rehert Kushner (June 22, 1929 – January 7, 1990) was an American journalist and pioneering advocate for breast cancer patients. She wrote the 1975 book Why Me? What Every Woman Should Know About Breast Cancer to Save Her Life.

Rose Rehert was born on June 22, 1929, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her parents were Eastern European immigrants Israel and Fannie Gravitz Rehert, both of whom died by the time she was 10 years old. As a child, she aspired to a career as a physician, but her family was unable or unwilling to send her to college. After high school she worked at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine from 1947 to 1951 and took pre-med courses at Baltimore Junior College in 1949.

In 1951 she married Harvey Kushner and had three children, born between 1952 and 1958. She returned to college in the 1960s, changing her concentration to journalism, and in 1972 receiving an A.B. degree summa cum laude from the University of Maryland. In the late 1960s and early 1970s she did medical writing and freelance journalism work, including work in Bolivia and Vietnam, as well as coverage of the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

After Rose Kushner's June 1974 discovery of a cancerous lump in her breast, breast cancer became the focus of her life. On the basis of her library research into breast cancer treatment, she objected to the treatment which was then standard, in which a tumor biopsy and radical mastectomy were performed in a single surgical operation while the patient was under anesthesia. However, she had difficulty finding a doctor who would perform a diagnostic biopsy and allow her to decide what action to take next. After a biopsy determined that her tumor was cancerous, she resisted the then-standard radical mastectomy procedure, in which muscle tissue and lymph nodes were removed along with the breast. In order to have a less invasive procedure, she traveled from her Kensington, Maryland home to Buffalo, New York, where she had found a doctor (Dr. Thomas Dao) who was willing to do a modified radical mastectomy.

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