It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. This translated book is based on the Chinese. There are 81 chapters in a question-and-answer format between the mythical Yellow Emperor and his ministers. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.įrom the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave may have cut off her diseased breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive-and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease. 371409), founder of the Northern Wei dynasty, was cautiously interested in alchemy and used condemned criminals for clinical trials of immortality elixirs (like Mithridates VI of Pontus r. The first part of Neijing which is called Suwen Basic Questions or Essential Questions covers the theoretical foundation of Chinese medicine as well as disease diagnosis and treatment. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with-and perished from-for more than five thousand years. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and now a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer-from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.

The emperor of diseases