The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Sidney Farber was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1903, one year after Virchow’s death in Berlin. His father, Simon Farber, a former bargeman in Poland, had immigrated to America in the late nineteenth century and worked in an insurance agency. The family lived in modest circumstances at the eastern edge of town, in a tight-knit, insular, and often economically precarious Jewish community of shop owners, factory workers, bookkeepers, and peddlers. Pushed relentlessly to succeed, the Farber children were held to high academic standards. Yiddish was spoken upstairs, but only German and English were allowed downstairs. The elder Farber often brought home textbooks and scattered them across the dinner table, expecting each child to select and master one book, then provide a detailed report for him. Sidney, the third of fourteen children, thrived in this environment of high aspirations. He studied both biology and philosophy in college and graduated from the University of Buffalo in 1923, playing the violin at music halls to support his college education. Fluent in German, he trained in medicine at Heidelberg and Freiburg, then, having excelled in Germany, found a spot as a second-year medical student at Harvard Medical School in Boston. (The circular journey from New York to Boston via Heidelberg was not unusual. In the mid-1920s, Jewish students often found it impossible to secure medical-school spots in America—often succeeding in European, even German, medical schools before ...