Biography of cancer read

The page is dedicated to Robert Sandler - and those who were before and after him. The disease is a dark side of life, a kind of other citizenship. Giving birth, everyone receives dual citizenship in the kingdom of health and in the kingdom of the disease. And although we all prefer to use the passports of the country of health, sooner or later each of us is forced to leave its limits at least temporarily.

Susan Umbrella. The disease as a metaphor per year is about six hundred thousand Americans and more than seven million people around the world died of cancer. In the United States, every third woman and every second man will get cancer sooner or later. A quarter of all deaths in America and about fifteen percent of deaths around the world will occur due to cancer.

In some countries, cancer will overtake heart disease and will become the most common cause of death. The introduction of this book is the history of cancer, a chronicle of an ancient ailment: the disease, which was once almost invisible, which only whispered, but which was reborn into the deadly, ever-changing element, performed by such an all-pervasive metaphorical, medical, scientific and political force, which cancer is often called the plague of our generation.

This book is “biography” in the most accurate sense of the word, an attempt to penetrate the essence of an immortal illness, to comprehend its nature, to dispel the veil of secrets that envelops it. But my main goal is to raise a question that goes beyond the biography: is it possible to put an end to this ail in the future? Is it possible to forever eradicate him from our bodies and our society?

Cancer is not one disease, but many different diseases. We call them “cancer” because they all have a fundamental common property: anomalous cell division. In addition to this biological community, various cancer incarnations are deeply woven into general cultural and political problems, and this also justifies the unification of them all in a single narrative.

It is not possible to familiarize the reader with each of the individual types of cancer in detail, but I tried to illuminate global topics that penetrate the entire four thousand -year history of the existence of this disease. The project, with all its grandeur, began with a much more modest plan. In the summer of the year, I went through medical residency and, protecting the graduation work on oncological immunology, began an internship in a narrow specialty clinical oncology at the oncology institute Dana and Farber and Massachusetts Clinical Hospital in Boston.

Initially, I just wanted to keep a diary - so to speak, notes from trenches. However, my idea has grown into a real research expedition, into a long journey on the wilds of not only science and medicine, but also cultures, history, literature and politicians - a kind of excursion into the past and future of cancer. In the center of my story are two characters - contemporaries, idealists, children of the post -war American upsurge of science and technology, captured by a whirlpool of hypnotic, obsessed with a desire to unleash the national “war with cancer”.

The first of them is Sydney Farber, the father of modern chemotherapy, accidentally discovering that the analogue of vitamin helps against cancer, caught fire of a dream to create a universal cure for this disease. The second is Mary Lasker, a legendary figure in the social circles of New York, a public figure, an active participant in the US social and political life, for many years vigorously supported Farber in his searches.

Lasker and Farber serve as a vivid example of daring, imagination, ingenuity and optimism of countless generations of men and women, who for four thousand years entered the battle with cancer. In a sense, my book is a chronicle of the war with a shapeless, all -pervasive, immortal and variable enemy. In this war there are their victories and defeats, campaigns follow campaigns, heroes and conceited impudents arise, miracles of stamina and resistance appear - and the wounded, doomed, forgotten, fell inevitably.

Cancer, having entered in full force, became, according to one surgeon of the nineteenth century, "the emperor of all ailments, the lord of horror." I warn you right away: in science and medicine, where the discovery championship plays a huge role, the mantle of the inventor or discoverer is given by the community of scientists and researchers. Although all kinds of discoveries and inventions are repeatedly mentioned in this book, none of these references is a legal evidence of the unconditional championship.

Моя работа основана на материалах книг, исследований, журнальных статей, воспоминаний и интервью, а также на огромном вкладе отдельных лиц, библиотек, коллекций, архивов и документов, с благодарностью перечисленных в конце книги. However, I must express one of the thanks at the very beginning. This work is not only a journey into the past of cancer, but also my personal path of formation as an oncologist.

The path that would be impossible without patients, because it was they who taught and inspired me above all others. I am in non -payment and eternal duty to them. This debt imposes certain obligations on me.Describing the history of patients in my book, I faced a big problem: how to do this without violating privacy and without inflicting the dignity of patients. In cases where the general public was known about the fact of the disease as a result of previous interviews or articles, I used real names.

In cases where outsiders did not know about the disease or when my interlocutors insisted on maintaining confidentiality, I used fictional names and deliberately distorted characteristic features and circumstances to complicate the identification. However, everything here is real patients and real circumstances, and I ask readers to respect them and their personal space. The prologue one desperate remedy can be a desperate disease to heal.

Hamlet [1] Cancer begins with people and ends with them. Among scientific abstractions, it is easy to forget this basic fact ... Doctors treat diseases - but they also do people. These fundamental, diametrically opposite requirements of the profession create a conflict of interest. June Goodfield on the morning of May 19 Karl Reed, a thirty -year -old teacher of the kindergarten from the Massachusetsky town Ipsvich, the mother of three babies, woke up with a headache.

From such numbness it is immediately clear-something is very, very out of order. Something was very, very out of order for almost a whole month. At the end of April, Karl found several bruises on her back-they appeared one morning, suddenly and for no reason, then increased in size, but for a month they disappeared by themselves, leaving on their backs large traces, similar to a map of unknown lands.

Carla’s gums almost imperceptibly, little by little began to whiten. By the beginning of May, Karl, the energetic and full of life, is used to spending many hours in the classroom, running ahead of the five- and six-year-olds, already with difficulty climbed the stairs to the second floor. Sometimes in the mornings, exhausted, unable to get to her feet, she crawled from one room to another on all fours.

She slept in fragments, but for twelve - fourteen hours, and, waking up, she felt such incredible fatigue that she fell back a little more.