The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

But with case forty-five, Imhotep fell atypically silent. Under the section titled “Therapy,” he offered only a single sentence: “There is none.” With that admission of impotence, cancer virtually disappeared from ancient medical history. Other diseases cycled violently through the globe, leaving behind their cryptic footprints in legends and documents. A furious plague—typhus, perhaps—blazed through the port city of Avaris in 1715 BC, decimating its population. Smallpox erupted volcanically in pockets, leaving its telltale pockmarks on the face of Ramses V in the twelfth century BC. Tuberculosis rose and ebbed through the Indus valley like its seasonal floods. But if cancer existed in the interstices of these massive epidemics, it existed in silence, leaving no easily identifiable trace in the medical literature—or in any other literature. More than two millennia pass after Imhotep’s description until we once more hear of cancer.