The Emperor of All Maladies

Siddhartha Mukherjee calls The Emperor of All Maladies a biography of cancer, and he means the term literally, tracing the disease as a single subject with its own history rather than as a collection of unrelated case studies. He opens nearly four thousand years back with the Egyptian physician Imhotep's description of a breast tumor with no known treatment, and moves forward through the Persian queen Atossa, whose tumor was excised by a Greek slave physician in the story Herodotus told around 440 BC, the humoral theories of Hippocrates and Galen that shaped medical thinking on the disease for centuries, and the disfiguring radical mastectomies developed by the American surgeon William Halsted in the nineteenth century.

The book gathers pace in the twentieth century with Emil Grubbe's early experiments treating tumors with X rays, the pioneering, often brutal early chemotherapy trials led by Sidney Farber and by Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman, and the political push behind Richard Nixon's 1971 War on Cancer, whose promises Mukherjee treats with open skepticism about how quickly a cure could actually arrive. Throughout, Mukherjee, an oncologist himself, weaves in his own clinical fellowship, the patients he treated and the daily uncertainty of practicing cancer medicine, so that centuries of history and one doctor's ordinary hospital shifts sit inside the same book.

Mukherjee ends not with a cure but with a more sober accounting of how far treatment has come and how much further it has to go. Reading the book means following a genuinely epic sweep of medical history written in clear, often literary prose, closer at times, one reviewer noted, to a detective story than a textbook, and it suits any reader curious about disease, medicine or the history of science who wants that history made personal rather than clinical.