Other advances in cancer therapy came from unexpected sources: In 1943, a warship carrying drums of the First World War weapon mustard gas was blown up, and some of the survivors of that explosion later succumbed to bone-marrow failure. In the modern era, he neatly tells the story of the first breakthroughs in chemotherapy, with the treatment of childhood leukemia, and the dramatic but short-lived (at first) remissions of the disease, together with the negative pushback that nurses and parents inflicted on Sidney Farber, the "father" of modern pediatric pathology, pleading with him to let the suffering children die peacefully. The Emperor of All Maladies begins with the Egyptian physician Imhotep, who wrote the earliest description of breast cancer, noting under "Treatment" that "there is none." As Mukherjee explains clearly, surgery was the sole mainstay of cancer treatment for many centuries, until radiotherapy was started in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is a superb storyteller, and this ability makes the book entertaining and, for the most part, engrossing. Despite this overweening problem, New York oncologist and Columbia University professor Siddhartha Mukherjee has written an interesting, and often absorbing, account of the most significant milestones in the history of cancer research and treatment, and has included many mini-biographies and anecdotes about the major figures in the story.
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