The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer Read Free Page B

than a century. The disease had been analyzed, classified, subclassified, and subdivided meticulously; in the musty, leatherbound books on the library shelves at Children’s—Anderson’s
Pathology
or Boyd’s
Pathology of Internal Diseases
—page upon page was plastered with images of leukemia cells and appended with elaborate taxonomies to describe the cells. Yet all this knowledge only amplified the sense of medical helplessness. The disease had turned into an object of empty fascination—a wax-museum doll—studied and photographed in exquisite detail but without any therapeutic or practical advances. “ It gave physicians plenty to wrangle over at medical meetings,” an oncologist recalled, “but it did not help their patients at all.” A patient with acute leukemia was brought to the hospital in a flurry of excitement, discussed on medical rounds with professorial grandiosity, and then, as a medical magazine drily noted, “ diagnosed, transfused—and sent home to die .”
    The study of leukemia had been mired in confusion and despair eversince its discovery. On March 19, 1845, a Scottish physician, John Bennett, had described an unusual case, a twenty-eight-year-old slate-layer with a mysterious swelling in his spleen. “ He is of dark complexion ,” Bennett wrote of his patient, “usually healthy and temperate; [he] states that twenty months ago, he was affected with great listlessness on exertion, which has continued to this time. In June last he noticed a tumor in the left side of his abdomen which has gradually increased in size till four months since, when it became stationary.”
    The slate-layer’s tumor might have reached its final, stationary point, but his constitutional troubles only accelerated. Over the next few weeks, Bennett’s patient spiraled from symptom to symptom—fevers, flashes of bleeding, sudden fits of abdominal pain—gradually at first, then on a tighter, faster arc, careening from one bout to another. Soon the slate-layer was on the verge of death with more swollen tumors sprouting in his armpits, his groin, and his neck. He was treated with the customary leeches and purging, but to no avail. At the autopsy a few weeks later, Bennett was convinced that he had found the reason behind the symptoms. His patient’s blood was chock-full of white blood cells. (White blood cells, the principal constituent of pus, typically signal the response to an infection, and Bennett reasoned that the slate-layer had succumbed to one.) “The following case seems to me particularly valuable,” he wrote self-assuredly, “as it will serve to demonstrate the existence of true pus, formed universally within the vascular system.” *
    It would have been a perfectly satisfactory explanation except that Bennett could not find a source for the pus. During the necropsy, he pored carefully through the body, combing the tissues and organs for signs of an abscess or wound. But no other stigmata of infection were to be found. The blood had apparently spoiled—suppurated—of its own will, combusted spontaneously into true pus. “ A suppuration of blood ,” Bennett called his case. And he left it at that.
    Bennett was wrong, of course, about his spontaneous “suppuration” of blood. A little over four months after Bennett had described the slater’s illness, a twenty-four-year-old German researcher, Rudolf Virchow, independently published a case report with striking similarities to Bennett’scase. Virchow’s patient was a cook in her midfifties. White cells had explosively overgrown her blood, forming dense and pulpy pools in her spleen. At her autopsy, pathologists had likely not even needed a microscope to distinguish the thick, milky layer of white cells floating above the red.
    Virchow, who knew of Bennett’s case, couldn’t bring himself to believe Bennett’s theory. Blood, Virchow argued, had no reason to transform impetuously into anything. Moreover, the unusual symptoms bothered him: What