The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist. It was published on 16 November 2010 by Scribner.
In a sense, this is a military history—one in which the adversary is formless, timeless, and pervasive. Here, too, there are victories and losses, campaigns upon campaigns, heroes and hubris, survival and resilience—and inevitably, the wounded, the condemned, the forgotten, the dead. In the end, cancer truly emerges, as a nineteenth-century surgeon once wrote in a book's frontispiece, as "the emperor of all maladies, the king of terrors."
The book weaves together Mukherjee's experiences as a hematology/oncologyfellowatMassachusetts General Hospital as well as the history of cancer treatment and research.[2][3] Mukherjee gives the history of cancer from its first identification 4,600 years ago by the Egyptian physician Imhotep. The Greeks had no understanding of cells, but they were familiar with hydraulics. Hippocrates thus considered illness to be an imbalance of four cardinal fluids: blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm. Galen applied this idea to cancer, believing it to be an imbalance of black bile. In 440 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus recorded the first breast tumor excision of Atossa, the queen of Persia and the daughter of Cyrus, by a Greek slave named Democedes. The procedure was believed to have been successful temporarily. Galen's theory was later challenged by the work of Andreas Vaselius and Matthew Baille, whose dissections of human bodies failed to reveal black bile.
According to Mukherjee, the book was a response to the demand of a patient: "I'm willing to go on fighting, but I need to know what it is that I'm battling."[4] Mukherjee states that two of his influences for the book were Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On and Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, but the defining moment for him was "when he conceived of his book as a biography".[4]
The Emperor of All Maladies won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction: the jury called it "an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal".[5][6][2]The Guardian wrote that "Mukherjee manages to convey not only a forensically precise picture of what he sees, but a shiver too, of what he feels."[7]Literary Review commended Mukherjee's narrative: "It is so well written, and the science is so clearly explained, that it reads almost like a detective story—which, of course, it is."[8]
It was described, by the magazine TIME, as one of the 100 most influential books of the last 100 years,[9] and by The New York Times Magazine as among the 100 best works of non-fiction.[10]
2014: Swedish: Lidandets konung: Historien om cancer, Albert Bonniers Förlag (ISBN9789100132699).
2014: Thai: จักรพรรดิแห่งโรคร้าย ชีวประวัติโรคมะเร็ง : The Emperor of All Maladies : A Biography of Cancer, สุนันทา วรรณสินธ์ เบล แปล, สำนักพิมพ์มติชน (ISBN978-974-02-1085-6).
2015: Persian: "سرطان امپراطور بیماریها", The House of Biology (ISBN978-600-6926-36-0).
2015: Icelandic: Meistari allra meina: Ævisaga krabbameins, Forlagið (ISBN978-9979-53-617-8).
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