Indian-American doctor Siddhartha? Mukherjee, who once treated an abdominal cancer patient in Boston who had received chemotherapy but had relapsed and had to be treated again, said, “I was willing to continue treatment, but I had to know what the enemy was that I was fighting. In a sense, Mukherjee’s book, “The King of All Diseases,” which took six years to complete, is an attempt to answer this patient’s question by going back to the origins of the disease and telling its 4,000-year history. In the process of writing the “history” of cancer. Mukherjee felt that he was writing not about a “thing” but about a “person”. The subject of the book evolved into something like a “person”, a mysterious, distorted image in a mirror. Rather than being a history of a disease, it is a biography of a more personal, flesh-and-blood disease. Cancer is not one disease, but many diseases. We call them collectively “cancers” because they share one basic characteristic – abnormal cell growth. To illustrate the history of the understanding and treatment of cancer, let’s take the example of breast cancer, the first record of which appears in 2625 B.C. in the pen of the great ancient Egyptian physician Indo-Hotep, who said that the lumps that bulged from the breasts were hard and cold and dense like he-mango, lurking and spreading under the skin. Under “treatment,” he wrote simply: “There is no cure.” The cancer reappeared 2,000 years later when the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote his book “History” around 440 B.C., was suddenly struck by an unusual disease in Darius’ wife, the queen Atossa. Finding herself with a bleeding lump on her breast, probably caused by a particularly malignant inflammatory breast cancer, a Greek slave named Demosthenes convinced her – and asked him to help her remove the tumor. Two hundred years later, in Thrace, Hippocrates named the tumor “karkinos,” a name that is used to this day, and in 168 A.D. Galen postulated the universal cause of the disease: a systematic excess of black bile, trapped depression that eventually erupted into a tumor. Medieval surgeons knew only the skinny on Atossa’s disease, but they would remove the tumor with a knife. 1778 London clinics classified breast cancer as early, localized, advanced, and invasive, with the former being operated on locally and the latter being “sympathetic. In 1890 in Baltimore, USA, the famous doctor Halstead treated breast cancer with the most daring treatment to date, the radical mastectomy. In the early 20th century, radiation oncologists attempted to eliminate tumors locally with X-rays. In the 1950s, a new generation of surgeons used a combination of both surgical and radiological strategies. in the 1970s, new therapies emerged, and Atosha’s surgery was accompanied by adjuvant chemotherapy to reduce the probability of recurrence, and if the tumor tested positive for estrogen receptors, an anti-estrogen drug called moxifen was used to prevent recurrence. in 1986, Atosha’s tumor would be further tested for the her-2 gene If so, in addition to surgery, radiation, adjuvant chemotherapy and moxifen, Atosha also received Herceptin for targeted therapy. How effective are these treatments? Atossa 500 B.C. compared to 1986, perhaps these treatments would have added 17-30 years to her survival time. The early history of cancer is that there is very little early history of cancer. Even common cancers, such as breast, lung, and prostate, are conspicuously “absent” from the history books. In the vast history of medicine, with very few exceptions, there is not a single book about cancer, nor is there a God who guards cancer patients. There are several reasons behind the absence of cancer in history. Cancer is an age-related disease, the chances of which sometimes increase exponentially with age. For example, the chance of developing breast cancer is 1 in 400 among women in their 30s; while 1 in 9 women in their 70s will develop breast cancer. In ancient societies, people were threatened by diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, smallpox, leprosy, bubonic plague or pneumonia for a long time and often died before they got cancer. Even when cancer existed, it was submerged in a sea of other diseases. In fact, the rise of cancer in the world is the result of a “double negative”: cancer only became common when all other “human killers” were eliminated. Nowadays, scientists believe that human genes are constantly breaking down from the embryo onwards under the enormous pressure of the environment, and that the cumulative result of the damage is theoretically cancerous and cancerous, and that ‘old age’ and cancer are almost inseparable if one lives long enough. Unless human beings can protect their genes, reduce the rate of genetic breakage, and reduce the chance of genetic breakage, aging and cancer are bound to come hand in hand in the end. The best result is how to endlessly push back the speed of human aging and delay the process of cancer ‘channeling’, or to control the cancer that has already occurred so that it will not recur. That is, in all likelihood, cancer is normal for us as well, and we are destined to eventually come to a fatal end. With the proportion of the population affected by cancer in some countries relentlessly growing from a quarter, to a third, or even a half, cancer will undoubtedly become the unavoidable new normal. The question is then no longer whether we will encounter this eternal disease in our lives, but when we will encounter it.