Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, reporters writing up obituaries sometimes had trouble obtaining one vital fact: the cause of death. Not because it was suicide or an embarrassing disease like syphilis, but because the cause of death was cancer. Back then, many people didn't want it known that such a mysterious, relentless killer had visited their family.

Nowadays, a bunch of female breast cancer survivors are posing for semi-nude photographs in a fund-raising calendar.

As the newly released Martha Stewart might opine: This is a good thing.

To be sure, despite a constant stream of medical advances, the grim reaper isn't going anywhere. Death still takes no holidays. But today we celebrate success stories where before there was nothing but despair.

Michele Weaver-Knowles, 45, a Missoula pediatric nurse who has posed for the calendar wearing nothing but jewelry in order to raise breast cancer awareness, is such a story. Six years after being diagnosed, she had endured chemotherapy and radiation, a double mastectomy, breast reconstruction, and tattooing to make the plastic surgery look more real. Weaver-Knowles sees it as her mission to serve as an inspiration for others who have just been diagnosed.

She also serves as an example of how far pharmaceuticals, surgical procedures and the knowledge of preventative medicine have come.

In their new book, "A Change of Heart," Dr. Daniel Levy and journalist Susan Brink show us how far that is. The authors recount the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, who was killed by a stroke at the age of 63 in April, 1945. It turns out that for at least a decade prior to his death, FDR had a constantly worsening blood pressure problem. In 1937 his pressure was 169/98 (normal is 120/80). By June, 1944, it was 260/118. Minutes before his death a check of his blood pressure showed the deadly reading of 300/190.

Roosevelt had the best medical care the country could provide. But his doctor didn't understand the causes of heart attacks and strokes; he wrote off the hypertension as being common in older men. (It was. And it commonly killed them.) Of course, to the extent the blood-pressure readings did concern the doctor, it didn't matter. In the mid-1940s, medical science could do nothing about high blood pressure.

Advances in health care come incrementally, so we often don't fully appreciate how much has changed. But when we stop to think about it, it's as plain as a photograph in a calendar.