Siddhartha Mukherjee

"En que punto nos encontramos en nuestra batalla contra el cancer y como hemos llegado hasta aqui? De que forma ha ido cambiando nuestra imagen de esta enfermedad y como ha influido esa evolucion en la propia trayectoria del mal? Estamos ganando o perdiendo la guerra contra el cancer? Esta magistral obra, ganadora del Premio Pulitzer, responde a estas preguntas partiendo de una reciente consideracion: el cancer no es solo un fenomeno medico. Se trata tambien de un fenomeno social que ocupa un complejo espacio cultural y politico. Su historia no puede contarse exclusivamente como un ensayo cientifico sino tambien como un relato profundamente humano. Este guarda testimonios de lucha y optimismo, de descubrimientos revolucionarios y terribles decepciones, de heroes y victimas, y de la incansable busqueda de una cura. Siddartha Mukherjee ha realizado una labor epica en la que aborda el cancer con la precision de un biologo celular, la riqueza en detalles de un novelista, el registro de un historiador y la pasion de un biografo. Desde Atosa, la reina de Persia, que dio instrucciones a un esclavo para que le extirpara un pecho, hasta Carla, una de sus pacientes, Siddhartha Mukherjee aborda en este fascinante libro mas de 5.000 anos de descubrimientos, obstaculos, victorias y muerte."--Desde la descripcion de la editorial.

una biografía del cáncer

El emperador de todos los males

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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