8.6 /10 1 Votes
Country United States Publisher Scribner Pages 592 Originally published 16 November 2010 Page count 592 Genre Non-fiction | 4.3/5 Goodreads Language English Publication date 16 November 2010 ISBN 978-1-4391-0795-9 Subject Cancer | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Awards Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Guardian First Book Award Similar Siddhartha Mukherjee books, Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction winners, Non-fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist. Published on 16 November 2010 by Scribner, it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction: the jury called it "an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal".
Contents
Siddhartha mukherjee overthrowing the emperor of all maladies moving forward against cancer
Content
The book weaves together Mukherjee's experiences as a hematology/oncology fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital as well as the history of cancer treatment and research. Mukherjee gives the history of cancer from its first identification 4,600 years ago by the Egyptian physician Imhotep. The Greeks had no understanding of cells, but they were familiar with hydraulics, so they used hydraulic metaphors, of humors, which were fluids whose proper balance, they believed, produced health and sickness. According to the book, cancer existed in silence in history until 440 before the Common Era, where the Greek historian Herodotus records the story of Atossa the queen of Persia and the daughter of Cyrus, who noticed a lump in her breast. The tumor was excised by her Greek slave named Demasitis, where the procedure is believed to have been successful at least temporarily.
In the 19th century, surgical approaches were developed to deal with tumors. William Halsted developed an aggressive, disfiguring breast surgery as a strategy for removing not only existing cancer cells but also places to which they might have spread.
Leukemia, a cancer of blood cells, was first observed by Rudolph Virchow, and Franz Ernst Christian Neumann localized the pathology to the bone marrow. Leukemia cells are dependent on the enzyme dihydrofolate reductase. Sidney Farber used molecules developed by Yellapragada Subbarow to block the enzyme and destroy the leukemia cells, producing a temporary remission in the disease.
The book proceeds right on through to the latest research and therapies.
According to Mukherjee, the book was a response to the demand of a patient: "I’m willing to go on fighting, but I need to know what it is that I’m battling." Mukherjee states that two of his influences for the book were Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On and Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, but the defining moment for him was "when he conceived of his book as a biography".
It was described, by the magazine TIME, as one of the 100 most influential books of the last 100 years, and by The New York Times magazine as among the 100 best works of non-fiction.