“The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” by Siddhartha Mukherjee

I wasn’t totally sure what to expect from this book. It was recommended to me by a friend who knew that I was interested in medicine and diseases, but I couldn’t tell whether it would be a history, medicine, biographic, scientific, or a memoir. Somehow, it’s a combination of all of those categories.

Mukherjee starts by introducing the reader to one of his patients, Carla. She develops leukemia as an adult, and her story is interwoven through the history of cancer as the author shows its path throughout human history. Mukherjee starts at the very beginning, with the mention of cancer in an Ancient Egyptian scroll. From there, he traces the documentation of it onwards, through the ancient world, the progression of surgery, to chemotherapy, and into the modern day.

The combination of showing the historical and scientific progression of cancer on one hand, and the patients the author has personally treated on the other, makes the work both universal and deeply intimate. We know as readers that the author knows what he’s talking about, because he has seen much of it first-hand. He even hunted down a few key patients and physicians to interview them for this work.

Mukherjee masterfully takes complex biological concepts and breaks them down for the average reader, so all of his thoughts are easily discernable. It is always a challenge when writing about science to not simplify so much as to make the concepts inaccurate, but he does a good job of putting more nit-picky qualifiers within the footnotes. This keeps the clarity intact for readers, but also maintains the accuracy of the text.

What I was most surprised about was the depth of literary thought within this book. Mukherjee takes cancer apart historically, but then also puts it into context of the mindset towards cancer of the age. Symbolically, cancer can be pretty powerful. Mukherjee discusses how this disease is a mutation of our normal cells, and therefore is the body turned against itself. It has come to represent the modern age in a similar way to how TB represented the Victorian Era, and is also compared to the AIDS epidemic in the 80s. Mukherjee involves quite a bit of depth in his analysis of the social and symbolic significance of this disease, where I expected a drier historical or scientific approach.

The result is that this is a very unique and powerful book. Even if you know nothing of cancer, you can easily keep up with the scientific developments as they are explained here. Or if you know quite a bit of the science, you can gain from the historical context. Many different aspects of the disease are illuminated here, all succinctly and clearly. I would highly recommend giving it a read!