If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients.

If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients.

Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.

I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?

It felt—nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos—that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer.

Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.

History repeats, but science reverberates.