The Emperor of all Maladies

The Emperor of all Maladies

By Siddhartha Mukherjee

Forth Estate (2011)

When I was a kid, cancer was not so common and only talked about in hushed tones as anyone diagnosed with it was considered as having been handed a death sentence.  Today, so many of my friends and family have been diagnosed with cancer in one or another of its forms.  Some of them are still around after having undergone treatment, including chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

I’ve been curious about this ‘sudden popularity’ of cancer, Is it something to do with what we eat and drink? Is it our lifestyle? Am I going to be the next one?

This book, ‘A Biography of Cancer’, traces the history of cancer from Imhotep’s Egypt (2500 BC) to the present.  So cancer is not a scourge of modern living but a very old disease.  It’s just that people used to die of various other illnesses that have been eradicated today, long before they could contract cancer.  By the way, cancer does not seem to be a contractible disease like most other diseases.  It’s more of like our own cells have forgotten how to stop multiplying and to ‘die’ naturally.  (Maybe the stories of people who, for themselves to remain immortal, had to take the lives of others are actually based on cancer.)

The book also traces the people who have dedicated their lives to finding a cure for cancer.  Often times it has just been trial and error.  The old maxim that every medicine is a potential poison has been turned around to there is potential medicine in every poison, thus the use of cytotoxic drugs in chemotherapy.

One of the main stumbling blocks to finding that cure is determining the cause of cancer, what triggers the cells to misbehave.  It is known that that there is a correlation between smoking and lung cancer, yet why is it that not all smokers contract lung cancer.

The book is well written (did I mention, the author is an oncologist) and is a worthwhile read although whether you will be any closer to understanding cancer is debateable – I am no wiser about cancer even after reading the book.