the emperor of maladies a biography of cancer

Hippocrates thus considered illness to be an imbalance of four cardinal fluids: blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm. The Greeks had no understanding of cells, but they were familiar with hydraulics. Mukherjee gives the history of cancer from its first identification 4,600 years ago by the Egyptian physician Imhotep. 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. In the end, cancer truly emerges, as a nineteenth-century surgeon once wrote in a book's frontispiece, as 'the emperor of all maladies, the king of terrors.' Content Here, too, there are victories and losses, campaigns upon campaigns, heroes and hubris, survival and resilience-and inevitably, the wounded, the condemned, the forgotten, the dead. In a sense, this is a military history-one in which the adversary is formless, timeless, and pervasive. The book explains its title in its author's note: The Guardian wrote that 'Mukherjee manages to convey not only a forensically precise picture of what he sees, but a shiver too, of what he feels.' Literary Review commended Mukherjee's narrative: 'It is so well written, and the science is so clearly explained, that it reads almost like a detective story-which, of course, it is.' Title

The Emperor of All Maladies won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction: the jury called it 'an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal'.

It was published on 16 November 2010 by Scribner. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist.

The emperor of maladies a biography of cancer