The Emperor of All Maladies. Siddhartha Mukherjee

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       “A monster more insatiable than the guillotine”

      The medical importance of leukemia²⁵ has always been disproportionate to its actual incidence. . . . Indeed, the problems encountered in the systemic treatment of leukemia were indicative of the general directions in which cancer research as a whole was headed.

      —Jonathan Tucker, Ellie: A Child’s Fight Against Leukemia

      There were few successes in the treatment²⁶ of disseminated cancer. . . . It was usually a matter of watching the tumor get bigger, and the patient, progressively smaller.

      —John Laszlo, The Cure of Childhood Leukemia: Into the Age of Miracles

      Sidney Farber’s package of chemicals happened to arrive at a particularly pivotal moment in the history of medicine. In the late 1940s, a cornucopia of pharmaceutical discoveries²⁷ was tumbling open in labs and clinics around the nation. The most iconic of these new drugs were the antibiotics. Penicillin, that precious chemical that had to be milked to its last droplet during World War II (in 1939, the drug was reextracted²⁸ from the urine of patients who had been treated with it to conserve every last molecule), was by the early fifties being produced in thousand-gallon vats. In 1942, when Merck had shipped²⁹ out its first batch of penicillin—a mere five and a half grams of the drug—that amount had represented half of the entire stock of the antibiotic in America. A decade later, penicillin³⁰ was being mass-produced so effectively that its price had sunk to four cents for a dose, one-eighth the cost of a half gallon of milk.

      New antibiotics followed in the footsteps of penicillin: chloramphenicol in 1947³¹, tetracycline in 1948³². In the winter of 1949, when yet another miraculous antibiotic, streptomycin, was purified out of a clod of mold from a chicken farmer’s barnyard, Time magazine splashed the phrase “The remedies are in our own backyard,”³³ prominently across its cover. In a brick building on the far corner³⁴ of Children’s Hospital, in Farber’s own backyard, a microbiologist named John Enders was culturing poliovirus in rolling plastic flasks, the first step that culminated in the development of the Sabin and Salk polio vaccines. New drugs appeared at an astonishing rate: by 1950, more than half the medicines³⁵ in common medical use had been unknown merely a decade earlier.

      Perhaps even more significant than these miracle drugs, shifts in public health and hygiene also drastically altered the national physiognomy of illness. Typhoid fever³⁶, a contagion whose deadly swirl could decimate entire districts in weeks, melted away as the putrid water supplies of several cities were cleansed by massive municipal efforts. Even tuberculosis³⁷, the infamous “white plague” of the nineteenth century, was vanishing, its incidence plummeting by more than half between 1910 and 1940, largely due to better sanitation and public hygiene efforts. The life expectancy of Americans³⁸ rose from forty-seven to sixty-eight in half a century, a greater leap in longevity than had been achieved over several previous centuries.

      The sweeping victories of postwar medicine illustrated the potent and transformative capacity of science and technology in American life. Hospitals proliferated³⁹—between 1945 and 1960, nearly one thousand new hospitals were launched nationwide; between 1935 and 1952, the number of patients admitted more than doubled from 7 million to 17 million per year. And with the rise in medical care came the concomitant expectation of medical cure. As one student observed,⁴⁰ “When a doctor has to tell a patient that there is no specific remedy for his condition, [the patient] is apt to feel affronted, or to wonder whether the doctor is keeping abreast of the times.”

      In new and sanitized suburban towns, a young generation thus dreamed of cures—of a death-free, disease-free existence. Lulled by the idea of the durability⁴¹ of life, they threw themselves into consuming durables: boat-size Studebakers, rayon leisure suits, televisions, radios, vacation homes, golf clubs, barbecue grills, washing machines. In Levittown, a sprawling suburban settlement built in a potato field on Long Island—a symbolic utopia—“illness” now ranked third⁴² in a list of “worries,” falling behind “finances” and “child-rearing.” In fact, rearing children was becoming a national preoccupation at an unprecedented level. Fertility rose steadily⁴³—by 1957, a baby was being born every seven seconds in America. The “affluent society,”⁴⁴ as the economist John Galbraith described it, also imagined itself as eternally young, with an accompanying guarantee of eternal health—the invincible society.