The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

The book starts out rooted firmly in the human experience, told through the stories of patients, doctors, and discoverers from the ancients up through the modern era. I found these stories fascinating and often incredibly sad; I could relate to them. Around the 1960s the book shifts into a more technical vein, which makes sense because this is when so many innovations in cancer research and treatment began, but I found myself disengaging from the story. The author does a laudable job of keeping the human experience a part of the story, but this is a biography of cancer - not humans - and at some point the story becomes less about “us” and more about “it”. Or rather, “them”, because one of the most fascinating parts of the book was seeing how heterogenous cancer is in the human body. Lymphomas are completely different from breast cancer, which is completely different from sarcoma, etc. I truly had no idea.

Also fascinating was how breast cancer was the focus of cancer research for literally hundreds of years. This seems like a woman-positive situation until you discover the devastating surgeries and experiments that doctors inflicted on the female body. Would they have been so quick to carve out literal pounds of flesh if these were male bodies? Would male patients have had more authority over their own care, and been fully informed about what was about to be done to their bodies? Kudos to the author for explicitly calling out the medical industry on its historically cavalier treatment of women, and acknowledging the women of the 1970s who refused to be sidelined in their own treatment, and thus forged the patients' rights movement out of the second-wave feminist movement.