Learning about incidents, events and history sometimes gives a good perception of the past and the present. The helplessness of the past, the ease of the present and the challenges / uncertainties of the future. One book which brought this notion up beautifully was Siddhartha Mukherjee’ s Pulitzer-winning novel,‘ Emperor of Maladies’. It is a must read for every medical student. I was lucky enough to be introduced to this by one of the seniors( Arjun Gupta, batch 2007) who started narrating to me how anti-folate drugs( like methotrexate) started being used for cancer treatment. There was a time when there wasn’ t much knowledge of cancer, its pathogenesis, its biology and things alike. It was flummoxing for doctors. There was a school of thought according to which cancer could be a result of improper replication. And what does one need for good replication? Folate.( the story behind this deduction is also mentioned in the book) So a physician in the USA started a study to observe the effects / change in the prognosis of leukemia patients. So he recruited children for the study and administered them with folate supplements. And as you can imagine, the cell counts went off the roof! Patients crashed and the study came to an abrupt, unceremonious end. But, this got him thinking, what if I develop folate antagonists? Hence, methotrexate! The book gives this whole story in a more systematic way, with dates, names and details. The greats of oncology like Farber, Sidney Kimmel, and their contriine via ature
sheds light on the island of Pingelap and Pompeii( part of Micronesia) where‘ Total achromatopsia’ is endemic and people suffering from it form a good 30 % of the population. Lucidly written it appeals to both language and science. The book describes how the local population easily identifies neonates with colour blindness based on jitteriness, excessive crying, tearing during the day and relative comfort during the night. It’ s not just the sheer number of the affected that makes this the island of the colour-blind but the recognition / common knowledge about this condition that makes it endemic. The affected people used to engage in vocations that could be done in the night. They used to make use of negative films( photograph) to cover their eyes during the day otherwise they just couldn’ t function. Low-cost sunglasses! After this, in the Oliver sacks phase of my life. The book‘ Awakenings’ dealt with the post-encephalitic parkinsonism( Encephalitis lethargica). In 1917, there was an epidemic which affected nearly 5 million people wherein a viral infection( possibly the Spanish flu) led to symptoms which resemble present day parkinsonism i. e. mutism, catatonia, akinesia. A lot of people died in the acute stage but people who survived lived motionless for years together. This was the basis of the 1991 movie‘ Awakenings’ featuring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. The book talks about how l-Dopa brought about overnight improvement in these patients and that it was nothing less than a‘ wonder drug’. Doctors and researchers were amazed to see patients move and speak after years or decades together. Magic!
You understand and retain much better from such books when it is told in an interesting literature like way and not a textbook