The Emperor Of All Maladies

In The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher and award-winning science writer, examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with and perished from for more than five thousand years. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of predecessors and peers, training their wits against an adversary that is infinitely resourceful. From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteenth-century recipient of primitive radiation and chemotherapy and Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, this book is about the people who have fought to survive and increase human knowledge. It provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and a new perspective on how humans have observed and understood the human body for millennia.