Dr. Love is survived via her spouse, Dr. Helen Sperry Cooksey, a surgeon, whom she married in San Francisco in 2004 all through the transient length when same-sex marriages have been being carried out there, sooner than a California poll proposition made them unlawful in 2008. Additionally surviving is their daughter, Katie Patton-LoveCooksey, whose adoption via her two moms in 1993 — Dr. Love was once the organic mom; each ladies reared her from start — was once the primary granted to a same-sex couple in Massachusetts. As well as, Dr. Love is survived via two sisters, Christine Adcock and Elizabeth Love, and a brother, Michael James Love.

These days, about a quarter-million new circumstances of breast most cancers are identified every 12 months. Although the illness has a better survival charge than prior to now, its purpose has no longer been known definitively, and the pre-emptive strike of which Dr. Love dreamed is but to be.

One way devised via Dr. Love, referred to as ductal lavage, can display sufferers for an increased possibility of breast most cancers. Ductal lavage flushes out cells from the breast’s milk ducts, the place breast most cancers regularly originates, in order that they is also analyzed for abnormalities that counsel an increased possibility of the illness. However the methodology is bulky, time-consuming and dear, and it isn’t extensively used.

Dr. Love’s different books come with “Dr. Susan Love’s Hormone E-book” (1997; with Ms. Lindsey), reissued in 2003 as “Dr. Susan Love’s Menopause and Hormone E-book.”

If during her paintings Dr. Love antagonized some contributors of her occupation, that was once, as she noticed it, a collateral result, if an inevitable one.

“One of the crucial feedback that I worth probably the most got here from one in every of my colleagues in Boston,” Dr. Love advised The Montreal Gazette in 1996. “He at all times considered me as being the child in ‘The Emperor’s New Garments,’ the one that’s pronouncing, ‘Good day, wait a minute, there’s no garments there.’ And that’s the position that I experience probably the most.”

Maia Coleman contributed reporting.