The Secret History of the War on Cancer
Title | The Secret History of the War on Cancer PDF eBook |
Author | Devra Davis |
Publisher | PublicAffairs |
Pages | 562 |
Release | 2009-02-24 |
Genre | Medical |
ISBN | 0465015689 |
From the National Book Award finalist and author of "When Smoke Ran Like Water" comes this searing, haunting, and deeply personal account of how a major public health effort was diverted and distorted for private gain.
The Secret History Of The War On Cancer
Title | The Secret History Of The War On Cancer PDF eBook |
Author | Davis Devra |
Publisher | |
Pages | |
Release | 2003 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
The Secret History of the War on Cancer
Title | The Secret History of the War on Cancer PDF eBook |
Author | Devra Davis |
Publisher | Basic Books (AZ) |
Pages | 512 |
Release | 2007-12-10 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 9780465005352 |
From the National Book Award finalist and author of "When Smoke Ran Like Water" comes this searing, haunting, and deeply personal account of how a major public health effort was diverted and distorted for private gain.
The Great Secret: The Classified World War II Disaster that Launched the War on Cancer
Title | The Great Secret: The Classified World War II Disaster that Launched the War on Cancer PDF eBook |
Author | Jennet Conant |
Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Pages | 400 |
Release | 2020-09-08 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1324002514 |
The gripping story of a chemical weapons catastrophe, the cover-up, and how one American Army doctor’s discovery led to the development of the first drug to combat cancer, known today as chemotherapy. On the night of December 2, 1943, the Luftwaffe bombed a critical Allied port in Bari, Italy, sinking seventeen ships and killing over a thousand servicemen and hundreds of civilians. Caught in the surprise air raid was the John Harvey, an American Liberty ship carrying a top-secret cargo of 2,000 mustard bombs to be used in retaliation if the Germans resorted to gas warfare. When one young sailor after another began suddenly dying of mysterious symptoms, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Alexander, a doctor and chemical weapons expert, was dispatched to investigate. He quickly diagnosed mustard gas exposure, but was overruled by British officials determined to cover up the presence of poison gas in the devastating naval disaster, which the press dubbed "little Pearl Harbor." Prime Minister Winston Churchill and General Dwight D. Eisenhower acted in concert to suppress the truth, insisting the censorship was necessitated by military security. Alexander defied British port officials and heroically persevered in his investigation. His final report on the Bari casualties was immediately classified, but not before his breakthrough observations about the toxic effects of mustard on white blood cells caught the attention of Colonel Cornelius P. Rhoads—a pioneering physician and research scientist as brilliant as he was arrogant and self-destructive—who recognized that the poison was both a killer and a cure, and ushered in a new era of cancer research led by the Sloan Kettering Institute. Meanwhile, the Bari incident remained cloaked in military secrecy, resulting in lost records, misinformation, and considerable confusion about how a deadly chemical weapon came to be tamed for medical use. Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Great Secret is the remarkable story of how horrific tragedy gave birth to medical triumph.
The Nazi War on Cancer
Title | The Nazi War on Cancer PDF eBook |
Author | Robert Proctor |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 391 |
Release | 2018-06-05 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0691187819 |
Collaboration in the Holocaust. Murderous and torturous medical experiments. The "euthanasia" of hundreds of thousands of people with mental or physical disabilities. Widespread sterilization of "the unfit." Nazi doctors committed these and countless other atrocities as part of Hitler's warped quest to create a German master race. Robert Proctor recently made the explosive discovery, however, that Nazi Germany was also decades ahead of other countries in promoting health reforms that we today regard as progressive and socially responsible. Most startling, Nazi scientists were the first to definitively link lung cancer and cigarette smoking. Proctor explores the controversial and troubling questions that such findings raise: Were the Nazis more complex morally than we thought? Can good science come from an evil regime? What might this reveal about health activism in our own society? Proctor argues that we must view Hitler's Germany more subtly than we have in the past. But he also concludes that the Nazis' forward-looking health activism ultimately came from the same twisted root as their medical crimes: the ideal of a sanitary racial utopia reserved exclusively for pure and healthy Germans. Author of an earlier groundbreaking work on Nazi medical horrors, Proctor began this book after discovering documents showing that the Nazis conducted the most aggressive antismoking campaign in modern history. Further research revealed that Hitler's government passed a wide range of public health measures, including restrictions on asbestos, radiation, pesticides, and food dyes. Nazi health officials introduced strict occupational health and safety standards, and promoted such foods as whole-grain bread and soybeans. These policies went hand in hand with health propaganda that, for example, idealized the Führer's body and his nonsmoking, vegetarian lifestyle. Proctor shows that cancer also became an important social metaphor, as the Nazis portrayed Jews and other "enemies of the Volk" as tumors that must be eliminated from the German body politic. This is a disturbing and profoundly important book. It is only by appreciating the connections between the "normal" and the "monstrous" aspects of Nazi science and policy, Proctor reveals, that we can fully understand not just the horror of fascism, but also its deep and seductive appeal even to otherwise right-thinking Germans.
Cancer Wars
Title | Cancer Wars PDF eBook |
Author | Robert Proctor |
Publisher | |
Pages | 372 |
Release | 1995 |
Genre | Medical |
ISBN |
Written by a highly regarded historian of science, this meticulouly researched, eminently fair, and very provocative book attempts to answer the question: Why, given all the time and money spent on cancer research, can't we get consistent answers to the most fundamental questions about prevention and treatment?
The Emperor of All Maladies
Title | The Emperor of All Maladies PDF eBook |
Author | Siddhartha Mukherjee |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Pages | 624 |
Release | 2011-08-09 |
Genre | Health & Fitness |
ISBN | 1439170916 |
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is “an extraordinary achievement” (The New Yorker)—a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.