The Emperor of All Maladies. Siddhartha Mukherjee
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But the rarity of ancient cancers notwithstanding, it is impossible to forget the tumor growing in the bone of Aufderheide’s mummy of a thirty-five-year-old. The woman must have wondered about the insolent gnaw of pain in her bone, and the bulge slowly emerging from her arm. It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy.
Black bile without boiling118 causes cancers.
—Galen, AD 130
We have learned nothing119, therefore, about the real cause of cancer or its actual nature. We are where the Greeks were.
—Francis Carter Wood in 1914
It’s bad bile120. It’s bad habits. It’s bad bosses. It’s bad genes.
—Mel Greaves, Cancer: The Evolutionary Legacy, 2000
In some ways disease121 does not exist until we have agreed that it does—by perceiving, naming, and responding to it.
—C. E. Rosenberg
Even an ancient monster needs a name. To name an illness is to describe a certain condition of suffering—a literary act before it becomes a medical one. A patient, long before he becomes the subject of medical scrutiny, is, at first, simply a storyteller, a narrator of suffering—a traveler who has visited the kingdom of the ill. To relieve an illness, one must begin, then, by unburdening its story.
The names of ancient illnesses are condensed stories in their own right. Typhus, a stormy disease, with erratic, vaporous fevers, arose from the Greek tuphon, the father of winds—a word that also gives rise to the modern typhoon. Influenza emerged from the Latin influentia because medieval doctors imagined that the cyclical epidemics of flu were influenced by stars and planets revolving toward and away from the earth. Tuberculosis coagulated out of the Latin tuber, referring to the swollen lumps of glands that looked like small vegetables. Lymphatic tuberculosis, TB of the lymph glands, was called scrofula, from the Latin word for “piglet,” evoking the rather morbid image of a chain of swollen glands arranged in a line like a group of suckling pigs.
It was in the time of Hippocrates, around 400 BC, that a word for cancer first appeared in the medical literature: karkinos, from the Greek word for “crab.” The tumor, with its clutch of swollen blood vessels around it, reminded Hippocrates of a crab dug in the sand with its legs spread in a circle. The image was peculiar (few cancers truly resemble crabs), but also vivid. Later writers, both doctors and patients122, added embellishments. For some, the hardened, matted surface of the tumor was reminiscent of the tough carapace of a crab’s body. Others felt a crab moving under the flesh as the disease spread stealthily throughout the body. For yet others, the sudden stab of pain produced by the disease was like being caught in the grip of a crab’s pincers.
Another Greek word would intersect with the history of cancer—onkos, a word used occasionally to describe tumors, from which the discipline of oncology would take its modern name. Onkos was the Greek term for a mass or a load, or more commonly a burden; cancer was imagined as a burden carried by the body. In Greek theater, the same word, onkos, would be used to denote a tragic mask that was often “burdened” with an unwieldy conical weight on its head to denote the psychic load carried by its wearer.
But while these vivid metaphors might resonate with our contemporary understanding of cancer, what Hippocrates called karkinos and the disease that we now know as cancer were, in fact, vastly different creatures. Hippocrates’ karkinos were mostly large, superficial tumors that were easily visible to the eye: cancers of the breast, skin, jaw, neck, and tongue. Even the distinction between malignant and nonmalignant tumors likely escaped Hippocrates: his karkinos included every conceivable form of swelling—nodes, carbuncles, polyps, protrusions, tubercles, pustules, and glands—lumps lumped indiscriminately into the same category of pathology.
The Greeks had no microscopes. They had never imagined an entity called a cell, let alone seen one, and the idea that karkinos was the uncontrolled growth of cells could not possibly have occurred to them. They were, however, preoccupied with fluid mechanics—with waterwheels, pistons, valves, chambers, and sluices—a revolution in hydraulic science originating with irrigation and canal-digging and culminating with Archaemedes discovering his eponymous laws in his bathtub. This preoccupation with hydraulics also flowed into Greek medicine and pathology. To explain illness—all illness—Hippocrates fashioned an elaborate doctrine based on fluids and volumes, which he freely applied to pneumonia, boils, dysentery, and hemorrhoids. The human body, Hippocrates proposed, was composed of four cardinal fluids called humors: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. Each of these fluids had a unique color (red, black, yellow, and white), viscosity, and essential character. In the normal body, these four fluids were held in perfect, if somewhat precarious, balance. In illness, this balance was upset by the excess of one fluid.
The physician Claudius Galen, a prolific writer and influential Greek doctor who practiced among the Romans around AD 160, brought Hippocrates’ humoral theory to its apogee. Like Hippocrates, Galen set about classifying all illnesses in terms of excesses of various fluids. Inflammation—a red, hot, painful distension—was attributed to an overabundance of blood. Tubercles, pustules, catarrh, and nodules of lymph—all cool, boggy, and white—were excesses of phlegm. Jaundice was the overflow of yellow bile. For cancer, Galen reserved the most malevolent and disquieting of the four humors: black bile. (Only one other disease, replete with metaphors, would be attributed to an excess of this oily, viscous humor: depression. Indeed, melancholia, the medieval name for “depression,” would draw its name from the Greek melas, “black,” and khole, “bile.” Depression and cancer, the psychic and physical diseases of black bile, were thus intrinsically intertwined.) Galen proposed that cancer was “trapped” black bile—static bile unable to escape from a site and thus congealed into a matted mass. “Of blacke cholor123 [bile], without boyling cometh cancer,” Thomas Gale, the English surgeon, wrote of Galen’s theory in the sixteenth century, “and if the humor be sharpe, it maketh ulceration, and for this cause, these tumors are more blacker in color.”
That short, vivid description would have a profound impact on the future of oncology—much broader than Galen (or Gale) may have intended. Cancer, Galenic theory suggested, was the result of a systemic malignant state, an internal overdose of black bile. Tumors were just local outcroppings of a deep-seated bodily dysfunction, an imbalance of physiology that had pervaded the entire corpus. Hippocrates had once abstrusely opined that cancer was “best left untreated,124 since patients live longer that way.” Five centuries later, Galen had explained his teacher’s gnomic musings in a fantastical swoop of physiological conjecture. The problem with treating cancer surgically, Galen suggested, was that black bile was everywhere, as inevitable and pervasive as any fluid. You could cut cancer out, but the bile would flow right back, like sap seeping through the limbs of a tree.
Galen died in Rome in 199 AD, but his influence on medicine stretched over the centuries. The black-bile theory of cancer was so metaphorically seductive that it clung on tenaciously in the minds of doctors. The surgical removal of tumors—a local solution to a systemic problem—was thus perceived as a fool’s operation. Generations of surgeons layered their own observations on Galen’s, solidifying the theory even further. “Do not be led away and offer125 to operate,” John of Arderne wrote in the mid-1300s. “It will only be a disgrace to you.” Leonard Bertipaglia, perhaps the most influential surgeon of the fifteenth century, added his own admonishment: “Those who pretend126 to cure cancer by incising, lifting, and extirpating it only