Lessons from two domestic wars: cancer and poverty

A generation ago, two successive US Presidents, not content with the burdens of conventional wars, went on to declare wars on the domestic front: Johnson on poverty (1964) [1] and Nixon on cancer (1971) [2]. Although neither war ever came to a successful conclusion, the focus on cancer seems to have achieved rather more than that on poverty [1,3]. Why should this have been so? What lessons can we draw from experiences in these two ‘wars‘? How is this relevant to healthcare and in particular oncology going forward?

We should at the outset recognize that the timing of the launches of these two wars was far from accidental because, as Saled acutely observed, the 1960s witnessed a shift in the primary focus of public anxieties, from the external (threat of nuclear war) to the internal (intrasocietal and intrapersonal) dimensions [2]. We can approach the similarities and dissimilarities between the two.

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