If you or your loved ones are currently battling cancer, you might not be in the mood to read Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: a Biography of Cancer. But the rest of us might find Mukherjee’s book an illuminating read.
How did they understand the disease centuries ago, when medicine was little more than blind supposition? The list of cures might make you think of bubbling cauldrons: “tincture of lead, extracts of arsenic, boar’s tooth, fox lungs . . . ground white-coral.”
Eventually, we discovered that bodies were made of cells. We learned what cells looked like and how they behaved.
Then we drew up our battle plans for fighting this galloping-out-of-control disease.
Should we burn it?
Cut it out?
Poison it?
Outwit it?
Is it triggered by a virus? By environment?
What works better? Curing it? Or preventing it?
“Lorenz Heister, an eighteenth-century German physician, once described a mastectomy in his clinic as if it were a sacrificial ritual: ‘Many females can stand the operation with the greatest courage and without hardly moaning at all. Others, however, make such a clamor that they may dishearten even the most undaunted surgeon and hinder the operation. To perform the operation, the surgeon should be steadfast and not allow himself to become discomforted by the cries of the patient.’”
Mind you, I think Dr. Heister was talking about surgery without anesthetic.
In the words of Richard Klausner of the National Cancer Institute: “It is extraordinarily difficult to predict scientific discovery, which is often propelled by seminal insights coming from unexpected directions.”
The scientists in Mukherjee’s book spend their lifetimes staring into their microscopes. They might build new molecules of no possible worth to mankind, and set them aside like a car with no wheels. Then one day they stumble across another scientist who has wheels but no car. Bind their work together and — Ouila! — new miracle drug!
And let’s award a special medal to Maria Papanicolaou, wife of the Pap Smear’s inventor. Her unique contribution to science . . . well, I’ll let you read that for yourself.
The battle against cancer remains a “queasy pivoting between defeatism and hope.” It’s no longer an automatic death sentence. We can throw cancer out the front door, but it can slip in again through a crack in the foundation.
Emperor of All Maladies sobers and encourages. It educates and entertains.
Who among us doesn’t worry that we will someday hear those awful words, “It’s malignant.”
Yet some of us will beat it.
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Today’s recipe gave me the chance to use my newest kitchen gadget — a ground meat chopper. 
Now my burger is as fine-textured as the meat at your local Taco Bell. That may not be cause for celebration to you, but lumpy meat has vexed me for some time now.
I turned all that exquisitely chopped meat into Sloppy Jose’s, a raid-the-pantry, quickie dish:
1 lb. ground beef
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup chopped celery
1 tsp. chili powder
1/2 tsp. salt
Dash pepper
1 can (10.75 oz.) condensed tomato soup
6 buns, split & toasted
Brown beef with onion, celery and seasonings; stir to separate meat particles. Add soup; simmer to blend flavors. Serve on buns.
From an old Campbell’s Soup cookbook.
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