Siddhartha Mukherjee

Wydawnictwo Czarne

Agnieszka Pokojska

Jan Dzierzgowski

A "biography" of cancer from its origins to the epic battle to cure, control, and conquer it. A combination of medical history, cutting-edge science, and narrative journalism that transforms the listener's understanding of cancer and much of the world around them. The author provides a glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and offers a bold new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers, and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.

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Manasi Gajjalapurna

Nineteenth-century doctors often linked cancer to civilization: cancer, they imagined, was caused by the rush and whirl of modern life, which somehow incited pathological growth in the body. The link was correct, but the causality was not: civilization did not cause cancer, but by extending human life spans—civilization unveiled it.

When a disease insinuates itself so potently into the imagination of an era, it is often because it impinges on an anxiety latent within that imagination. AIDS loomed so large on the 1980s in part because this was a generation inherently haunted by its sexuality and freedom; SARS set off a panic about global spread and contagion at a time when globalism and social contagion were issues simmering nervously in the West. 

Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises; when a disease touches such a visceral chord, it is often because that chord is already resonating.

Eight thousand miles away, in the cloth mills of Bombay (owned by English traders and managed by their cutthroat local middlemen), wages had been driven to such low levels that the mill workers lived in abject poverty, malnourished and without medical care. When English physicians tested these mill workers in the 1920s to study the effects of this chronic malnutrition, they discovered that many of them, particularly women after childbirth, were severely anemic. This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.

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