Mukherjee is an oncologist, and while he was undergoing advanced training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital, he decided to keep notes of his year. The notes ended up growing and growing, until he wrote a general overview of cancer, from historical personages who may have had cancerous growths to our understanding of cancer has changed over the centuries.
Understandably, the history of cancer prior to the past two or three centuries is rather fuzzy and involves a lot of diagnosis via speculation. I read this over a month ago, so I don't quite remember if he refers to non-Western-European sources or not. I vaguely feel like he referenced Chinese medicine, but confirmation would be welcome!
Things start to get more interesting when cancer is identified as a single disease, despite how it manifests in different parts of the body's systems. This new understanding of cancer went hand in hand with attempts to move forward on a cure, at least until some scientists and doctors began advocating more research on a practical level to find a cure and less "academic" research to understand how cancer works. Much of this narrative takes place in the US in the 1950s and 1960s.
I tend to enjoy pop science non-fiction, particularly when it comes to medicine, so I'm not sure how well this book works for people who dislike that genre. I do think the writing is particularly good, and I actually stayed up late into the night to finish reading the book, which is not something I usually say about non-fiction. Mukherjee is particularly good at tying together disparate research into a narrative, so that the place of radical masectomies in treatment to research on childhood leukemia to later research on DNA and retroviruses all contribute to the overall story. I felt like I understood most of his explanations, and I was very satisfied to get a better idea of just how cancer works and how there can be vaccinations for cervical cancer by the end of the book.
I also wish I had more Interesting Thoughts about how the cancer narrative and the AIDS narrative interweave; Mukherjee writes a bit on how AIDS research in the 1980s influenced cancer research and vice versa. I have a completely unsubstantiated thought about AIDS as a stigmatized disease, largely from watching Anna Deavere Smith's Let Me Down Easy, telling my sister about it, and having my sister ask, "How come no one talks about AIDS anymore?"
Which is where I go off and theorize that certain demographics now talk more about cancer than AIDS because cancer is largely a disease of age and aging—Mukherjee talks about how cancer rates have risen because of longer life expectancies and better health overall. On the other hand, I feel public perception of AIDS is that it's "someone else's" problem, not "ours," at least given extremely narrow definitions of "ours" that mesh closely with the demographics of populations with more power.
Anyway, back to the book. I really wanted to read more about issues of medical experimentation, human subjects, and consent and knowledge. Mukherjee writes about how AIDS activism for patient access to experimental treatments influenced cancer activism, and I feel like there's an entire book in there about access to treatment, who gets the experimental treatment and why, how treatments are proven safe for privileged bodies with underprivileged populations, and just how thorny and complex these issues are, particularly when they're around life-threatening diseases.
In conclusion: this is a fascinating write up of the personalities involved in cancer research, the main treatments and development thereof within the past century or so, and how our understanding of the disease itself has progressed. And it touches on activism around disease and how cancer started out as something no one talked about and evolved in the public consciousness so that we now have breast cancer walks and frequent magazine articles on the latest medical developments. And it's written in an extremely engaging, easy-to-read voice. (I'd love commentary on the flaws and virtues of Mukherjee's simplification for the lay reader.)
Highly recommended.
On a minor but amusing note, the library put the "Biography" sticker on the spine.
Links:
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rachelmanija's review
Understandably, the history of cancer prior to the past two or three centuries is rather fuzzy and involves a lot of diagnosis via speculation. I read this over a month ago, so I don't quite remember if he refers to non-Western-European sources or not. I vaguely feel like he referenced Chinese medicine, but confirmation would be welcome!
Things start to get more interesting when cancer is identified as a single disease, despite how it manifests in different parts of the body's systems. This new understanding of cancer went hand in hand with attempts to move forward on a cure, at least until some scientists and doctors began advocating more research on a practical level to find a cure and less "academic" research to understand how cancer works. Much of this narrative takes place in the US in the 1950s and 1960s.
I tend to enjoy pop science non-fiction, particularly when it comes to medicine, so I'm not sure how well this book works for people who dislike that genre. I do think the writing is particularly good, and I actually stayed up late into the night to finish reading the book, which is not something I usually say about non-fiction. Mukherjee is particularly good at tying together disparate research into a narrative, so that the place of radical masectomies in treatment to research on childhood leukemia to later research on DNA and retroviruses all contribute to the overall story. I felt like I understood most of his explanations, and I was very satisfied to get a better idea of just how cancer works and how there can be vaccinations for cervical cancer by the end of the book.
I also wish I had more Interesting Thoughts about how the cancer narrative and the AIDS narrative interweave; Mukherjee writes a bit on how AIDS research in the 1980s influenced cancer research and vice versa. I have a completely unsubstantiated thought about AIDS as a stigmatized disease, largely from watching Anna Deavere Smith's Let Me Down Easy, telling my sister about it, and having my sister ask, "How come no one talks about AIDS anymore?"
Which is where I go off and theorize that certain demographics now talk more about cancer than AIDS because cancer is largely a disease of age and aging—Mukherjee talks about how cancer rates have risen because of longer life expectancies and better health overall. On the other hand, I feel public perception of AIDS is that it's "someone else's" problem, not "ours," at least given extremely narrow definitions of "ours" that mesh closely with the demographics of populations with more power.
Anyway, back to the book. I really wanted to read more about issues of medical experimentation, human subjects, and consent and knowledge. Mukherjee writes about how AIDS activism for patient access to experimental treatments influenced cancer activism, and I feel like there's an entire book in there about access to treatment, who gets the experimental treatment and why, how treatments are proven safe for privileged bodies with underprivileged populations, and just how thorny and complex these issues are, particularly when they're around life-threatening diseases.
In conclusion: this is a fascinating write up of the personalities involved in cancer research, the main treatments and development thereof within the past century or so, and how our understanding of the disease itself has progressed. And it touches on activism around disease and how cancer started out as something no one talked about and evolved in the public consciousness so that we now have breast cancer walks and frequent magazine articles on the latest medical developments. And it's written in an extremely engaging, easy-to-read voice. (I'd love commentary on the flaws and virtues of Mukherjee's simplification for the lay reader.)
Highly recommended.
On a minor but amusing note, the library put the "Biography" sticker on the spine.
Links:
-
rachelmanija's review