The diagnosis appeared depressingly straightforward. The woman was 64. She had cervical cancer. And the X-ray I was looking at strongly suggested she would soon die from the disease.
But she didn't look like a terminal cancer patient. Sitting on the examining table at Cook County Hospital, Chicago's public hospital, this patient was ebullient, chatting along in Spanish with an Indian accent that I barely understood. She was round as a doughboy in her white paper gown, and her face, colored by the suns of Chihuahua, was deep brown. We had met a week ago when her daughter persuaded her to get her first Pap smear. A Pap smear is a sample of hundreds of thousands of cells scraped off the cervix, the lowermost end of the uterus, brushed onto a glass slide, and examined for abnormalities. The test is named after George Papanicolaou, who devised it for looking at hormonal function, then serendipitously found that the test detected cancer cells. Since the Pap smear was introduced in 1941, deaths from cervical cancer among American women have dropped by more than 70 percent.
