The Emperor of All Maladies (Siddhartha Mukherjee)

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

"Medicine, I said, begins with storytelling. Patients tell stories to describe illness; doctors tell stories to understand it. Science tells its own story to explain diseases."

"In the folklore of science, there is the often-told story of the moment of discovery: the quickening of the pulse, the spectral luminosity of ordinary facts, the overheated, standstill second when observations crystallize and fall together into patterns, like pieces of a kaleidoscope. The apple drops from the tree. The man jumps up from the bathtub; the slipper equation balances itself. But there is another moment of discovery--its antithesis--that is rarely recorded: the discovery of failure. It is a moment that a scientist often encounters alone. A patient's CT scan shows a relapsed lymphoma. A cell once killed by a drug begins to grow back. A child returns to the NCI with a headache."

"But the story of leukemia--the story of cancer--isn't the story of doctors who struggle and survive moving from one institution to another. It is the story of patients who struggle and survive, moving from one embankment of illness to another. Resilience, inventiveness, and survivorship--qualities often ascribed to great physicians--are reflected qualities, emanating first from those who struggle with illness and only then mirrored by those who treat them. If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients."

"Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure disease of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing. --Voltaire"

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