The Emperor of all Maladies
A BIOGRAPHY OF CANCER
SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE
Fourth Estate
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Copyright © Siddhartha Mukherjee 2011
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Source ISBN: 9780007250912
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2011 ISBN: 9780007435814 Version: 2017-09-20
To ROBERT SANDLER (1945–1948), and to those who came before and after him.
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
—Susan Sontag1
Contents
Copyright
Prologue
Part One - “Of blacke cholor, without boyling”
“A suppuration of blood”
“A monster more insatiable than the guillotine”
Farber’s Gauntlet
A Private Plague
Onkos
Vanishing Humors
“Remote Sympathy”
A Radical Idea
The Hard Tube and the Weak Light
Dyeing and Dying
Poisoning the Atmosphere
The Goodness of Show Business
The House That Jimmy Built
Part Two - An Impatient War
“They form a society”
“These new friends of chemotherapy”
“The butcher shop”
An Early Victory
Mice and Men
VAMP
An Anatomist’s Tumor
An Army on the March
The Cart and the Horse
“A moon shot for cancer”
Part Three - “Will you turn me out if I can’t get better?”
“In God we trust. All others [must] have data”
“The smiling oncologist”
Knowing the Enemy
Halsted’s Ashes
Counting Cancer
Part Four - Prevention Is the Cure
“Coffins of black”
The Emperor’s Nylon Stockings
“A thief in the night”
“A statement of warning”
Photographic Insert
“Curiouser and curiouser”
“A spider’s web”
STAMP
The Map and the Parachute
Part Five - “A Distorted Version of Our Normal Selves”
“A unitary cause”
Under the Lamps of Viruses
“The hunting of the sarc”
The Wind in the Trees
A Risky Prediction
The Hallmarks of Cancer
Part Six - The Fruits of Long Endeavors
“No one had labored in vain”
New Drugs for Old Cancers
A City of Strings
Drugs, Bodies, and Proof
A Four-Minute Mile
The Red Queen’s Race
Thirteen Mountains
Atossa’s War
Notes
Glossary
Selected Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
In 2010, about six hundred thousand Americans, and more than 7 million humans around the world, will die of cancer. In the United States, one in three women and one in two men will develop cancer during their lifetime. A quarter of all American deaths, and about 15 percent of all deaths worldwide, will be attributed to cancer. In some nations, cancer will surpass heart disease to