There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'.

In Paris, friend of Bequerel’s, a young physicist-chemist couple named Pierre and Marie Curie, began to scour the natural world for even more powerful chemical sources of X-rays. Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.

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.

History repeats, but science reverberates.

Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering.

One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.

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