Title : The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Author : Siddhartha Mukherjee
Publisher: Scribner
Pages : 592
ISBN :10:1439107955
Price : $17.35
It’s a matter of pride that an India-born doctor and researcher, Dr Sidharth Mukherjee, has been awarded this year’s Pulitzer prize for general non-fiction for his debut writing venture, ‘The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer’. Mukherjee’s work is notable because it goes beyond a prosaic and scientific account of cancer and becomes an intensely human document. Sensitivity and compassion, combined with medical expertise, give them a vantage point.
Mukherjee’s book is based on the personal experiences of cancer patients and survivors and gives an account of the clinical advances made till now and the research which is going on. He has said the purpose of writing the book was to demystify cancer and change the way people look at it, and hopes that if he succeeds in that, it is a bigger prize than the Pulitzer.As Mukherjee hopes, his work can inspire new researchers to work in that direction.
For cancer, although often considered a "plague of modern times", is ancient. The Egyptian physician Imhotep first mentioned it in 2625BC; Atossa, queen of Persia, was also afflicted, as Herodotus wrote in 440 BC. Rather than seek advice, she cloaked her "shame" – a breast tumour – and had a Greek slave cut off the offending flesh. Her gratitude to him, allegedly, "launched a thousand ships" in the Greco-Persian wars.
While cancer was certainly present, it remained little understood in subsequent centuries. Treatments included "fox lungs, tortoise liver and crab's eyes". In the 18th and 19th centuries, advances in surgery emerged, with seeds of further knowledge sown. Mukherjee shapes a massive amount of history into a coherent story with a roller-coaster trajectory: the discovery of radiation, chemotherapy, ending in disfiguring radical mastectomy and multidrug chemo so toxic the treatment ended up being almost worse than the disease.
One of the book's great strengths is the bringing to life of scientists: from the Scottish surgeon, Joseph Lister, who in 1865, inspired by Pasteur, discovered carbolic acid's vital role in surgery, to the morphine-addicted William Stewart Halsted. His name will be forever linked to mastectomy. It moves from the Curies' discovery of radium in 1902 to wartime mustard gas informing "Four-Button Sid" Farber's experiments with antifolates in 1947, oncology's first achievement. The full palette of human nature is revealed here.
The book's six sections are well-balanced, spread between medical strides of the past (such as the near eradication of scrotal cancer among chimney sweeps when soot was discovered to be a carcinogen), more recent challenges (such as taking on the tobacco industry, with China and India its current prey), case studies, and current research. It is heartening, and daunting, to read of our deeper understanding of the cancer cell's biological make-up.
Mukherjee looks ahead with guarded optimism and avoids blithe promises. He contemplates whether more modest goals – the substantial prolongation of life by increasingly palatable treatments, rather than cancer's complete eradication – might be a more feasible, and still enormous, victory. De-mystifying the disease, rendering the science accessible, and wearing respect for the patients uppermost, The Emperor of All Maladies is the book that many will have been waiting for.
Review Text Courtesy: http://www.deccanherald.com/, http://www.guardian.co.uk/, http://sidmukherjee.com/ , http://theindependent.com/
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