The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee, is an amazing read. I'm admittedly only about 100 pages in, but think it's quite awesome. He's tried to write a history/biography of the disease of cancer, and ends up talking about things you can't even imagine would be related. Firstly, the book is very entertaining, because he keeps his chapters short and keeps a narrative quality to the whole thing. Also, he jumps around stories a lot, which makes things sligthly hard to follow, but definitely adds to the entertainment factor as he brings all the stories together in the end. Some of the amazing things I've learned so far: chemotherapy is, in many ways, a mutated brain child of German dye-making industrial chemists who were recrutied to make the horrible Mustard Gas, which was a horrific staple of the Great War.
Click here to get a copy of the book. It will expand your thinking on cancer and medical practices in general. It will also make disease a lot less scary.
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