The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The word palliate comes from the Latin palliare, “to cloak”—and providing pain relief was perceived as cloaking the essence of the illness, smothering symptoms rather than attacking disease.

Politicians were far more protective of the narrow interests of tobacco than of the broad interest of public health. Tobacco makers need not have bothered inventing protective filters, Drew wrote drily: Congress had turned out to be “the best filter yet.”

Under the microscope, the bacterium growing on the plate was a minuscule, slow-growing, fragile organism with a helical tail, a species that had never been described by microbiologists. Warren and Marshall called it Helicobacter pylori—helicobacter for its appearance, and pylorus from the Latin for “gatekeeper,” for its location near the outlet valve of the stomach.

Flemming called his blue-stained structures chromosomes—“colored bodies.”