The Emperor of all Maladies: a Biography of Cancerby Siddhartha Mukherjee
Scribner, 2010. 571 pgs. Non-fiction.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and staff physician at Columbia University Medical Center, has written a magisterial history of what he describes as a magisterial disease. Cancer is an ancient curse, first appearing in recorded history in 2500 B.C. Variously described through the years as a disorder of the humors (black bile), a reaction to chemicals or radiation, a viral infection, cancer was attacked with radical surgeries, radiation, chemotherapy, herbal and homeopathic remedies. None was the elegant solution--the cure--that everyone sought. But the tireless (literally) efforts of doctors and other researchers have brought us to a point where we know that cancer is not one disease but many, arising from damaged and mutated genes, oncogenes that turn the switch relentlessly on for cell division and turn the switch off for tumor suppressors, mutating further as they go. Cancer treatment now depends on discovering the "pathways" the disease takes and trying to circumvent the advancing killer. Dr. Mukherjee describes his book as a biography because cancer is more an entity than a thing, "a malign variant of ourselves." Rarely has a story been more elegantly or compassionately told.
LW
1 comment:
This brilliant book traces the history of humanity’s understanding and treatment of cancer from earliest times to the present. Gripping accounts of patients, researchers and physicians battling cancer are intertwined in Mukherjee’s magnificent prose.
Even as science learns more about the biological basis for cancer, longer lifespans and our continually changing environment guarantee there will be more cancer, not less. Because every life will be touched by cancer in some way I highly recommend this book to all readers of nonfiction. SH
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