"Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing." ~Voltaire
Emperor of all maladies is a book by an Indian oncologist Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee which he describes as an biography of cancer. Its the chronicle of his fellowship in Massachusetts General Hospital as a hematology specialist. Cancer is not a new entity and it's history runs back from the Persian Queen Atossa whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast to one of her own patient who is a recipient of radiation and chemotherapy.
There are accounts of his numerous patients who were undergoing palliative treatment and numerous field trials, finally succumbing to death.Cancer is an expansionist disease; it invades through tissues, sets up colonies in hostile landscapes, seeking sanctuary in one organ and then immigrating to another. It lives desperately, inventively, fiercely, territorially, cannily, and defensively at times, as if teaching us how to survive. To confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than even we are.
Doctors treat diseases, but they also treat people, and this precondition of their professional existence sometimes pulls them in two directions at once.It's a poignant yet inspiring account of his frustration of being helpless before the tenacity of the disease to searching relentlessly for new drugs and treatment modalities. Although the disease seem invincible but we can't give up as he says that "Should I refuse my dinner because I don’t understand the digestive system?"
Its true that cancer has become an apocalypse in today's world and it hits you badly when you see a five year old getting the chemotherapy and undergoing painful procedures for ALL instead of playing with a toy. That when a woman undergoes mastectomy or hysterectomy she also loses a part of her feminity. When we see a moribund patient we see a pathological mirror of our own self. Just like the world invested huge amounts to send a man to moon, there is an urgent need to invest, collaborate and research to get an unprecedented victory over this parasite lurking within us.
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