With a few notable exceptions, in the vast stretch of medical history there is no book or god for cancer. There are several reasons behind this absence. Cancer is an age-related disease—sometimes exponentially so. The risk of breast cancer113, for instance, is about 1 in 400 for a thirty-year-old woman and increases to 1 in 9 for a seventy-year-old. In most ancient societies, people didn’t live long enough to get cancer.
