The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In April 2020, on a sweltering morning in Kolkata, India—the hawks outside my hotel room were circling upward, lifted by the warming air currents—I visited a shrine to the goddess Shitala, the deity that presides over the healing of smallpox. She shares the shrine with Manasa, the goddess of snakes, the healer of poisonous bites and the protectress against venom. Shitala’s name means the “cool one”: the myth runs that she arose from the cooled ashes of a sacrificial fire. But the heat that she is supposed to diffuse is not just the intractable wrath of summer that hits the city in mid-June but also the internal heat of inflammation. She is meant to protect against smallpox in children and to heal the pain of those that contract it. She is the anti-inflammatory goddess. The shrine was a small, damp room on the edge of College Street, a few miles from Kolkata Medical College. In the inner sanctum, moistened with sprays of water, there was a figurine of the goddess sitting on a donkey and carrying a jar of cooling liquid—the way she has been depicted since Vedic times. The temple was 250 years old, the attendant informed me. That would place it, not by coincidence, perhaps, from around the time when a mysterious sect of Brahmans began to wander up and down the Gangetic Plain to popularize the practice of tika: taking a live pustule from a smallpox patient, mixing it with a paste of boiled rice and herbs, and inoculating a child by rubbing the mixture on a sharp nick on the sk...