The Emperor of All Maladies
Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2011Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction 2011Shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book PrizeShortlisted for the Duff Cooper PrizeNow, as cancer becomes an ever more universal experience, the need to understand it, and its treatment, has never been more compelling. In this groundbreaking and award-winning account Siddhartha Mukherjee tells the fascinating story of our relationship with this disease. From brutal early surgical treatments, to Sidney Farber’s hugely risky discovery of chemotherapy, to the author’s treatment of his own patients, he reveals how far we have come in solving one of science's great mysteries and offers a fascinating glimpse of our future progress.
Читать The Emperor of All Maladies онлайн беплатно
The Emperor of all Maladies
A BIOGRAPHY OF CANCER
SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Copyright © Siddhartha Mukherjee 2011
The right of Siddhartha Mukherjee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
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 Sontag>1
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 become the most common cause of death.
Diseases desperate grown>2
By desperate appliance are relieved,
Or not at all.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Cancer begins and ends with people>3. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact. . . . Doctors treat diseases, but they also treat people, and this precondition of their professional existence sometimes pulls them in two directions at once.
—June Goodfield
On the morning of May 19, 2004, Carla Reed, a thirty-year-old kindergarten teacher from Ipswich, Massachusetts, a mother of three young children, woke up in bed with a headache. “Not just any headache,” she would recall later, “but a sort of numbness in my head. The kind of numbness that instantly tells you that something is terribly wrong.”
Something had been terribly wrong for nearly a month. Late in April, Carla had discovered a few bruises on her back. They had suddenly appeared one morning, like strange stigmata, then grown and vanished over the next month, leaving large map-shaped marks on her back. Almost indiscernibly, her gums had begun to turn white. By early May, Carla, a vivacious, energetic woman accustomed to spending hours in the classroom chasing down five- and six-year-olds, could barely walk up a flight of stairs. Some mornings, exhausted and unable to stand up, she crawled down the hallways of her house on all fours to get from one room to another. She slept fitfully for twelve or fourteen hours a day, then woke up feeling so overwhelmingly tired that she needed to haul herself back to the couch again to sleep.
