The narrative of cancer
A society’s narrative of cancer often evolves based on the technologies of its time — a truism the medical historian Siddhartha Mukherjee detailed to Pulitzer Prize–winning effect in his book, “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.” In the information age, Mukherjee said last week at Harvard Medical School (HMS), cancer is coming to be seen as an “organismal disease,” one that can be understood by studying the complex networks among and within cells, and among human networks and their environments. Mukherjee, whose ambitious history received the 2010 prize in general nonfiction, gave the 37th Joseph Garland Lecture. The annual talk is sponsored by the Boston Medical Library, which combined its collections with HMS’s Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine on the School’s Longwood campus in 1960. The setting was a familiar one to Mukherjee, M.D. ’00, who frequented the library as a Harvard student and later as an oncology fellow...