The Emperor of All Maladies, published in 2010, is subtitled A Biography of Cancer. Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist, began writing it during his fellowship training, prompted by a patient who wanted to know what she was fighting. The book tells the story of the disease and of human attempts to understand and treat it.
Mukherjee travels from an Egyptian physician's account of a breast tumour and the theories of Hippocrates and Galen to the radical mastectomies of William Halsted, the first childhood leukaemia remissions achieved by Sidney Farber with chemotherapy, the lobbying by Mary Lasker that led to the American war on cancer, the long fight to link smoking with lung cancer, and the discovery of oncogenes that led to targeted drugs such as Gleevec and Herceptin.
Woven among these histories are the stories of his own patients, which keep the human stakes in view. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2011 and was adapted into a documentary series. It is notable for explaining complex biology clearly while conveying both the progress and the humility the disease demands.
Book details
| Author | Siddhartha Mukherjee |
|---|---|
| First published | 2010 |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Popular science |
| Type | Non-fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 570 |
| Awards | Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction 2011 |
Themes
- History of medicine
- Cancer research
- Patient experience
- Chemotherapy and targeted therapy
- Public health and tobacco
Who should read it
Patients, families, medical students and anyone wanting to understand cancer's history and science.