To be clear, there is nothing private about having cancer. A diagnosis requires referrals and a bewildering number of scans and tests. There are ultrasounds, MRIs, PET scans; colonoscopies, bronchoscopies, endoscopies. There are needle biopsies, razor biopsies or liquid biopsies.
Most of the tests require getting beneath a robe, sometimes waiting in a large room full of other terrified strangers also in robes, before presenting oneself to strangers who push, jab, thread and insert tools into or onto body parts that are not normally explored.
Frequently, these tests have to be repeated, or different tests ordered, to rule something out.
“I’ve been naked in front of so many people in my life at this point. You sort of lose some of that sense of ‘My body is private,’” said Isabel Blumberg, who is my gynecologist. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019, Blumberg was the first person to call me. She told me that she had had cancer, too.
In the video Kensington Palace released on Friday, Catherine, Princess of Wales, revealed her cancer status after more than six weeks of silence and pleaded for privacy.
“We hope that you will understand that, as a family, we now need some time, space and privacy while I complete my treatment,” she said while wringing her thin hands. A princess no doubt bypasses the waiting rooms and receives a level of medical care inaccessible to most. But she cannot evade the intrusions and indignities of cancer — the anxious waiting for pathology reports, the shock of the news, the series of treatment decisions that no young, healthy person has ever imagined having to make. The treatment can feel like a grueling, interminable invasion.
And because Catherine, also known as Kate, is a princess, the violations went further: the wild and incessant speculation about what had gone wrong with her body, the alleged unauthorised infiltrations of her medical files, which the London Clinic, where she underwent “major abdominal surgery,” is investigating. “There is no place at our hospital for those who intentionally breach the trust of any of our patients or colleagues,” Al Russell, the clinic’s CEO, said in a statement.
Even in health, privacy is difficult for a public figure to attain, and since she married Prince William in 2011, Kate Middleton has lived under a microscope. Her physical body — her legs, her hair, her behind, her clothing — has been scrutinised in the way of every female celebrity but also because of her royal function and role.
Long ago, she traded her independence for rank, and her most important job has been to perpetuate the monarchy by bearing its heirs. In a very real way, her body is under inspection because it belongs to her nation, and to its future.
In becoming royal, a person secures a lifetime of luxury and comfort. But also, “you become a public body, the site of enormous projection, everything from longing to disdain. People pick you apart,” Susie Orbach, a psychoanalyst in London and New York who treated Princess Diana, said in an interview.
“There are so many different aspects of what it means to be a royal body — which obviously no one understands when they start going out with a prince.”
Guarding against incursions into privacy — controlling who has an interest in and access to the female royal body (for certainly no one is as obsessed with King Charles III’s health as they are with Kate’s) — is at least four centuries old.
Elizabeth I “spent an enormous amount of time authorising images of her body,” strategically projecting an image of potent virginity to avoid marriage in order to amass and preserve power, explained Jean Howard, a Renaissance scholar at Columbia University. “She had to produce a body that people would accept,” Howard said.
Working with court painters, the image makers of the time, Elizabeth I created “a virginity that everyone fetishised,” and unattainable. “She adorned herself with pearls of purity. She was painted in dresses that had a pearl right where it would be,” Howard said. When she passed childbearing age and could no longer wear virginity as armor, Elizabeth I instructed her portrait makers to render her as godlike — in Howard’s words, “the bride of Christ, married to her job and married to the country.”
But the monarchy has undergone the same cultural shift as everyone else — from bright lines between public and private selves to blurred ones, “from believing in privacy to believing you share everything,” Orbach said. When Queen Elizabeth II was pregnant in 1948 and 1950, with Prince Charles and Princess Anne, respectively, “the Queen was merely said to be in ‘an interesting condition’ and all photographs of that ‘condition’ were prohibited,” wrote Tina Brown in “The Diana Chronicles.” And in 1966, when the queen’s mother, Elizabeth, was admitted to the hospital, the communications team at Clarence House referenced “abdominal surgery,” and nothing further.
More than 40 years passed before the Queen Mother’s biographer, William Shawcross, revealed that a cancerous tumor had been removed from her colon.
“I hope they’re looking after you well,” Prince Charles, who was 18 at the time, wrote to his grandmother.
“Mummy said that you had difficulty getting around two gi-normous policemen wedged into the corridor outside your room.” By the time Charles was expecting his first child, the tabloids were full of stories about Diana’s morning sickness.
Lisa Miller
The author is a former writer with New York Magazine
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