Commonly identified as a disease of modern life, cancer has accompanied and threatened man since ancient times. Attempts to defeat it largely shaped the history of human and scientific progress (and failures) in the face of disease. From early Egyptian and Greek physicians to aseptic genetics labs, through medieval operations, Victorian operating rooms, the discovery of anesthesia and X-rays, the monumental and award-winning volume.

The Emperor of All Evils by oncologist Siddartha Mukherjee, is a sensitive and intelligent approach to the history of this disease today crossed by marketing, media, laboratory businesses, to which the United States came to declare war on and which we are only now beginning to understand.

In 2010, some 600,000 Americans, and more than 7 million people worldwide died of cancer. In the United States, one in three women and one in two men will develop cancer during their lifetime. A quarter of American deaths, and about 15 percent of all deaths in the world, will be attributed to him. ” These overwhelming numbers are the gateway to one of the 2011 publishing successes.

Winner of the Pulitzer and The Guardian’s First Book Award, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Top 10 of the year by a critical spectrum as broad as The The New York Times, Time magazine and Oprah Winfrey, The Emperor of All Evils is presented as nothing more and nothing less than the official biography of cancer.

Written between 5 and 15 minutes per day (what was left of free time to its now-famous author, but then respected and young full-time oncologist, more father of the family, Siddartha Mukherjee), the book has almost 700 pages and got contract when his deed went roughly in half. Of course, with Monday’s newspaper, the first thing you think is that it is incredible that the editors have not dueled for publishing it. But the truth is that its author ran into rather mixed thoughts where caution prevailed. “The responses were bipolar.

Or they would say, ‘No one is going to read about cancer,’ or, ‘How could this book not have been written before.’ ” What they all definitely agreed on was that cancer frightens, which only fueled the enthusiasm of its author. “For me, that was the wrong answer. If people are afraid, it is the main reason to speak, “he said emphatically, rounding up his ambitious project.

BRIEF HISTORY OF A LONG FIGHT

It was from the first autopsy that Galen’s theories began to collapse. There was no black bile but an organism to discover. The study of anatomy took up the idea of ​​surgical ablation of cancer, inaugurating an entire stage as prolific as it was bloody, recently alleviated by the discovery of anesthesia in 1846. “Anesthesia and antisepsis were combined technological advances that liberated surgery from its medieval chrysalis.

Armed with ether and carbon dioxide, a new generation of surgeons undertook terribly complex anatomical procedures. ” The adventurous first oncologists managed to remove some tumors from the body, but they could not prevent cancer from growing again sooner or later. Again and again “they went back to the operating table and cut,

The therapeutic frenzy to end the evil crab had its greatest exponent in William Halsted: a cocaine-addicted doctor who invented a radical mastectomy in the late 1800s. Empty the women’s body as much as possible (removing glands, muscles, even rib bones) in order to achieve total remissions and, in many cases, where it was not necessary to operate, with the sinister intention of bending their character.

The surgeries were quite a spectacle. The 1900s inaugurated the era of celebrity medical “trustworthy” who operated to the delight of witnesses as privileged as they were intrigued. “The operating room was for them a theater of operations and surgery, an elaborate performance, often witnessed by a silent audience watching from a skylight above the theater.”

Dazzled by their own brilliance, they could not even see yet the failure of the brutal operation. It was that no matter how much they removed, cancer returned or was already waiting, crouched, in some other organ.

Around the same time, in a different setting, a series of coincidences gave rise to the discoveries of X-rays, radio, and finally, eureka, the crazy idea that this new form of energy might be useful for all this. It was a young man of twenty-one, Emil Grubbe, who on instinct made the first successful test: “Grubbe began to bombard Rose Lee, an older woman affected with breast cancer, by means of an improvised X-ray tube ( …) He irradiated it for 18 days.

Although painful, the treatment had some success. ” Gruebbe immediately followed up with other patients, all with the same result: the tumors were shrinking. At the beginning of the 20th century “a new branch of cancer medicine was born, radiation oncology.”

Harper Harrison

Harper Harrison is a reporter for The Hear UP. Harper got an internship at the NPR and worked as a reporter and producer. harper has also worked as a reporter for the Medium. Harper covers health and science for The Hear UP.