Download The Emperor of All Maladies PDF by Siddhartha Mukherjee published on 16 November 2010. Read this book anytime and anywhere you want easily.
Authors Note
This book is a history of cancer. It is a chronicle of an ancient disease— once a clandestine, “whispered-about” illness—that has metamorphosed into a lethal shape-shifting entity imbued with such penetrating metaphorical, medical, scientific, and political potency that cancer is often described as the defining plague of our generation. This book is a “biography” in the truest sense of the word—an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality, to demystify its behavior. But my ultimate aim is to raise a question beyond biography: Is cancer’s end conceivable in the future? Is it possible to eradicate this disease from our bodies and societies forever?
The project, evidently vast, began as a more modest enterprise. In the summer of 2003, having completed a residency in medicine and graduate work in cancer immunology, I began advanced training in cancer medicine (medical oncology) at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. I had initially envisioned writing a journal of that year—a view-from-the-trenches of cancer treatment. But that quest soon grew into a larger exploratory journey that carried me into the depths not only of science and medicine, but of culture, history, literature, and politics, into cancer’s past and into its future.
The stories in this book present an important challenge in maintaining the privacy and dignity of these patients. In cases where the knowledge of the illness was already public (as with prior interviews or articles), I have used real names. In cases where there was no prior public knowledge, or when interviewees requested privacy, I have used a false name, and deliberately confounded identities to make it difficult to track them. However, these are real patients and real encounters. I urge all my readers to respect their identities and boundaries.
Reviews of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
1. Rating 4/5
What a magnum opus. With excellent analogies, piercing contextual investigations, stunning science, and delightful artistic references, Siddhartha Mukherjee takes us on a nitty-gritty yet all-encompassing outing spreading over hundreds of years. Presumably a standout amongst other science books I have ever perused.
My preferred parts in the book are the scholarly suggestions that catch the profundity and sentiment of what is being depicted so well. For example, Cancer Ward, Alice in Wonderland, Invisible Cities, Oedipus Rex and some more.
The most important of all is the point at which he embodies Cancer with a play on the most loved opening lines from Anna Karenina – “Upbeat families are generally indistinguishable; each miserable family is troubled in its own particular manner.” moves toward becoming “Ordinary cells are indistinguishably typical; threatening cells become despondently harmful in one of a kind ways.” This unacknowledged transmutation of the popular lines typifies the book for me, in a larger number of ways than one.
2. Rating 4/5
An incredible assemblage on all malignancy-related, from history to science, medicines, future points of view and clinical cases. In spite of the fact that a major thick book, with huge amounts of data, it is extraordinarily composed and clarified in a manner everybody can get it. For those very little into science or medication, it very well may be somewhat hard.
As stated, it is immense and tells such a large number of things, however worth perusing at any rate. From my perspective, the perspective on a prepared researcher with some malignant growth learning, and an admirer of prescription, science, and history, this book is awesome. Totally prescribed. Extraordinary compared to other true to life I’ve perused up until this point.
Inside this book
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. 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