The Emperor Of All Maladies Essay

The Emperor of All Maladies Book Review

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee is an in-depth analysis of the history of cancer. The book discusses the beginning stages of cancer when it was merely a confusing phenomenon for doctors that occurred for over a century. For example, "Childhood leukemia had fascinated, confused, and frustrated doctors for more than a century. The disease had been analyzed, classified, sub-classified, and divided meticulously” (Mukherjee 12). Mukherjee is a passionate physician and displays this in his work as a cancer researcher. Mukherjee book consists of his professional experiences working at the Dana-Farber

Cancer Institute where he did his oncology fellowship.

The book begins with a narrative of cancer relating back to its history. Cancer in the book is discussed as a confusing, complex disease that was hard to decode by doctors for over a century. Mukherjee gives rich details about the way people assessed breast cancer in the nineteenth century discussing how radiation and chemotherapy were once used before modern times. Further, into the book, Mukherjee shares with personal experience working in the field of

The words in the book are so fluid that readers are capable of visualizing a clear mental picture of his experiences with his patients and the situations they went through dealing with cancer. In addition, this book, notably comes to life after page 304. This is where Mukherjee added illustrations of situations involving cancer dating back to the medieval description of cancer in 2500 BC. There were also illustrations in the 18th century and 19th century of how breast cancer was treated up until the 1990’s when Barbara Bradfield became the first patient to be treated with the drug Herceptin which attacks breast cancer cells. With the supplementation of illustrations in the book, readers can visually see how thing occurred centuries