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#5 Platform: The Emperor of All Maladies
Mar. 22nd, 2012 07:09 pmFor the weight of the subject matter, this wasn’t actually depressing.
Book #12: The Emperor of All Maladies
Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
Provenance: Borrowed from Westmount Library
If there’s one disease these days that still has the power to really frighten people, I’d say it’s cancer. There’s no shortage of diseases that no one wants to contract, certainly, but it’s cancer that seems the most dramatic, cancer that represents the inward turning of the body against itself, cancer that is the subject of test upon test upon test, of our bodies and the things we surround ourselves with, cancer that seems somehow emblematic of our times. Where so many of the diseases of the past have been kept at bay for a long time now, cancer largely continues unabated.
It seems odd to set out on a project where the aim is to write the biography of a disease, but Mukherjee makes the case that as he addressed the history of cancer, it came to have a character unto itself, and it felt more like a description of a person. Indeed, he argues that cancer is in some sense the striving, energetic, evolved form of our cells, just one step beyond who we are now, and it’s precisely that character that makes it so difficult to defeat. Targeting what is essentially a funhouse version of ourselves, our genes with no brakes and a charge to keep going at a feverish pace, makes for perhaps the supreme medical challenge.
That marking of the character of the disease is not new to Mukherjee, but it’s well presented in his prose, and the overall work is magisterial, a lucid tale of haltingly learning the mysteries of a wide-spread disease through the past couple of centuries and trying to work out how to respond. He notes that cancer has been known since ancient Egypt (where the premier physician Imhotep quoted its treatment as “there is none”), and has been fleetingly heard from through history, but it is only comparatively recently that science really took a target on the disease, realizing that diseases that present themselves as differently as leukemia and pancreatic cancer may be underlyingly the same disease. Mukherjee lays out in detail both the scientific drive to work more on cancer – and as always, I’m amazed at how much was known already by the end of the 19th century, even if there was a long way to go – alongside the attempts to raise consciousness of cancer within wider society and gain funding and support.
The tale develops along several threads over the course of the book, generally focusing on different approaches to treatment that came about over time, and pulling the story forward as they did: surgery and radiology, chemotherapy, prevention, and the look for the underlying cause of cancer in genetics. Each section introduces a vivid batch of characters, researchers that crop up repeatedly across the history of cancer like Sidney Farber, Tom Frei and Emil Freireich, William Halsted, and others, alongside the people championing the cause, such as Mary Lasker, and how it tied into the politics of the time. There was a real gung-ho spirit evoked, against the human backdrop of how many the disease ravaged, how fleeting even the successes seemed to be, for the most part. The scientific material is presented in a clear and easily understood manner, and is well-balanced with the stories of the researchers, and of Mukherjee’s dealings with his own patients and their dealings with cancer.
Overall, actually, the writing is really quite well done; Mukherjee doesn’t let things get too heavy, because even when things go wrong, you still have this sense of fervent struggling to work problems out and make people better, to figure out more effective treatments for the future. This is a very solid piece of history, in that you really get a sense of the people and the decisions they made, both for good and bad. To have gotten as far as people did in effective treatments without knowing the underlying cause of cancer is remarkable, for example.
On the whole, this was a very interesting book, one well deserving of the praise it’s gotten, and one that isn’t nearly as scary as it might appear at first glance. You get a new sense of respect for the creativity and variety of science, just as much for the disease at the heart of the book. All that insight is definitely worth the read.
Next up: The Knife of Never Letting Go.
Book #12: The Emperor of All Maladies
Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
Provenance: Borrowed from Westmount Library
If there’s one disease these days that still has the power to really frighten people, I’d say it’s cancer. There’s no shortage of diseases that no one wants to contract, certainly, but it’s cancer that seems the most dramatic, cancer that represents the inward turning of the body against itself, cancer that is the subject of test upon test upon test, of our bodies and the things we surround ourselves with, cancer that seems somehow emblematic of our times. Where so many of the diseases of the past have been kept at bay for a long time now, cancer largely continues unabated.
It seems odd to set out on a project where the aim is to write the biography of a disease, but Mukherjee makes the case that as he addressed the history of cancer, it came to have a character unto itself, and it felt more like a description of a person. Indeed, he argues that cancer is in some sense the striving, energetic, evolved form of our cells, just one step beyond who we are now, and it’s precisely that character that makes it so difficult to defeat. Targeting what is essentially a funhouse version of ourselves, our genes with no brakes and a charge to keep going at a feverish pace, makes for perhaps the supreme medical challenge.
That marking of the character of the disease is not new to Mukherjee, but it’s well presented in his prose, and the overall work is magisterial, a lucid tale of haltingly learning the mysteries of a wide-spread disease through the past couple of centuries and trying to work out how to respond. He notes that cancer has been known since ancient Egypt (where the premier physician Imhotep quoted its treatment as “there is none”), and has been fleetingly heard from through history, but it is only comparatively recently that science really took a target on the disease, realizing that diseases that present themselves as differently as leukemia and pancreatic cancer may be underlyingly the same disease. Mukherjee lays out in detail both the scientific drive to work more on cancer – and as always, I’m amazed at how much was known already by the end of the 19th century, even if there was a long way to go – alongside the attempts to raise consciousness of cancer within wider society and gain funding and support.
The tale develops along several threads over the course of the book, generally focusing on different approaches to treatment that came about over time, and pulling the story forward as they did: surgery and radiology, chemotherapy, prevention, and the look for the underlying cause of cancer in genetics. Each section introduces a vivid batch of characters, researchers that crop up repeatedly across the history of cancer like Sidney Farber, Tom Frei and Emil Freireich, William Halsted, and others, alongside the people championing the cause, such as Mary Lasker, and how it tied into the politics of the time. There was a real gung-ho spirit evoked, against the human backdrop of how many the disease ravaged, how fleeting even the successes seemed to be, for the most part. The scientific material is presented in a clear and easily understood manner, and is well-balanced with the stories of the researchers, and of Mukherjee’s dealings with his own patients and their dealings with cancer.
Overall, actually, the writing is really quite well done; Mukherjee doesn’t let things get too heavy, because even when things go wrong, you still have this sense of fervent struggling to work problems out and make people better, to figure out more effective treatments for the future. This is a very solid piece of history, in that you really get a sense of the people and the decisions they made, both for good and bad. To have gotten as far as people did in effective treatments without knowing the underlying cause of cancer is remarkable, for example.
On the whole, this was a very interesting book, one well deserving of the praise it’s gotten, and one that isn’t nearly as scary as it might appear at first glance. You get a new sense of respect for the creativity and variety of science, just as much for the disease at the heart of the book. All that insight is definitely worth the read.
Next up: The Knife of Never Letting Go.
