Invitation

This has been posted on the listserv as well.  It would be great if you would rsvp if you are thinking of attending.  I like to know what the audience will be like :)

Meeting Aug 13.  1:45 Room West 13.  I'll bring the map for parts one and two again and we can talk about anything you might need to talk about.  Attendance is voluntary.

Mind Map Part 2

Find it here.
http://youtu.be/TtqNumm_QnI

Or at least I'm told you'll be able to find it there once it's done processing.  Someone let me know if you can't. 

Bear with me lately as I am swamped.  Two full days of professional development, two graduate courses to finish by Aug. 15 and then, you know, the regular mom stuff.  Oh, and I spent seven hours on Monday moving the furniture around in my classroom because I can procrastinate with the best of them. 

Tomorrow, I start Part Three.  I am sure that you are all ahead of me.  Yay!

Part Two

Well, that went pretty quickly.  Much more quickly than Part One.  So, because I dared to take a bit of a vacation again, and because no one has come forth to volunteer to map out Part Two, my next post will do just that.  Look for it later this evening.

I haven't forgotten you.

I'll get caught up tomorrow.

AP lang Meeting Tomorrow

I am so excited.  I've got about ten students who have RSVP'd.  If you can't make this meeting, no worries.  I'll have another in a few weeks.  I'll let you know how it goes.

VAMP

That was really easy.  Let's do it again. Somebody comment with the answers for the last entry and/or this one.

Knowledge/Comprehension questions:  (I added the word knowledge because it is the lowest level of thinking.  Questions at this level are "right there" answers.  You don't have to do much thinking about them.  They are "prove you read it" sorts of questions and answers.

Can I interrupt for a minute, though, to ask if anyone remembers the quantity of drugs that Carla was facing in her therapy?  I mean, VAMP?  Four drugs? Big deal, right?  So, we have to remember what the scientists were thinking at this point in time.  For most, it was " a terrifying notion, an abomination" (143).

Okay...questions....

1.  Explain the life and death parallel between the NCI and the children who were treated with VAMP.

Another interruption....but Mukherjee kind of interrupts too to give give us a definition of failure by way of comparison to the definition of success.  And that, my AP Langers, is craftsmanship.

2.  What is the reason that the VAMP kids return to Frei and Freireich?

Did you notice that Mukherjee circled ALL THE WAY back to Virchow in this section to lead into Frei and Freireich's discovery in the spinal fluid?

3.  What does Mukherjee mean when he says that the children were "felled by virtue of the adaptation designed to protect them?"  That one is a little more of a thinking question.

Another interruption: take a moment to admire the first paragraph on page 148.

4.  Here's a tricky question.  Identify the type of research that Mukherjee conducts during his trip to Maine.

Circle Back:  Atossa, Chiribaya mummy.  Beautiful move.

The cry of Sidney Farber:  "MORE! MORE! MORE!"  He's moving on to tumors. 

I kindof get the sense at the end of this section and as the next one begins that Mukherjee knows we need some narrative.  We've had a lot of medicine.  We need some human interest stories.  Enter Ben Orman.

Mice and Men

For this section, let's try some comprehension "questions" to guide your reading so that you can be sure you are focusing on the content that indicates comprehension of the ideas in the section.

1.  Describe the frustration that Frei and Freireich experienced with Zubrod's "sequential, systematic and objective trials.

2.  What did Howard Skipper, "the mouse doctor" learn by "charting the life and death of leukemia cells as they responded to drugs?"

3.  Describe the ways in which the acronym VAMP is a particularly fitting as a name.

Some interesting ideas about reading....

"...the only things worth reading in an academic class are those things we do not understand.....when we are confused is actually a sign of increased comprehension....as readers we should welcome and embrace confusion.  Learning begins when we encounter confusion......expect confusion.....confusion is natural and necessary" (qtd. in Gallager 63).


"...we remember 70 percent of what we talk about with others...the act of collaboration itself raises the reading comprehension of every student" (Gallagher 17).


Invitation to meet:  July 23. 1:45 pm, Room West 13.  RSVP: tmcallister@fhps.net
Bring yourself and your book, notes, questions, insights.


Gallagher, Kelly.  Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12. Stenhouse Publishers.    2004.

An Early Victory

"...But I do subscribe to the view that words have very powerful texts and subtexts" (135). Me, too, Mr. Broder.  That's why I'm here.

Min Chiu Li:  Reminds me of something Emerson once wrote: "To be great is to be misunderstood."  I think the same applies to Subbarao.

The Butcher Shop

So, now, we've got three Emils.  What is it with that name?  And where is the accent? And how do you get "Tom" out of Emil?

This is the screening trials section. Again, a test writer's dream.  Content that involves a list of criteria always turns itself easily into a multiple choice question.  It usually sounds something like, "All of the following are criteria of Zubrod's clinical trial protocol EXCEPT..."  I think "Zubrod" sounds like one of those names of drugs that are advertised on TV for acid reflux or allergies....the commercials where they list every possible horrific possible side effect....

And remember how I told you to pay attention to Carla's list of drugs, and that it would serve as a transition to the content of the next section?  Like this..."To thwart this resistance, doctors treating TB had used a blitzkrieg of antibiotics--two or three used together like a dense pharmaceutical blanket meant to smother all cell division and stave off bacterial resistance, thus extinguishing the infection as definitively as possible" (132).

That second quotation from Michael La Combe at the start of this section reminds me of Dr. Chung.  Some of you may know his daughter, Chloe, who graduated from Northern last year.  In the past two years, I have found myself in Dr. Chung's office more times than I ever dreamed I would be or wanted to be.  First, with Ms. Engelhardt and then, with my mom, who was diagnosed with Lymphoma last year (from which she has been "cured").  This drama, that LaCombe describes, it's there when one meets with Dr. Chung.  "Attentive, alert and ready" describes him perfectly.  At what felt like the end of my last meeting with him a few weeks ago with Ms. Engelhardt, I thought it was time for him to dismiss us.  Instead, he just sat and waited.  He waited for us to process all of the information we had taken in.  Even though we had already asked a dozen or more questions, he knew there were more to come as we worked over his message in our brains.  He waited and waited.  He waited so long that I noticed him waiting. I identified why he was waiting.  And I was touched by his patience.  I mean, he's kind of a big deal.  Not that that gives anyone permission to be less than "attentive, alert and ready", but he was noticeably so.  And, obligingly so. I'm thinking that Mukherjee's description of Frei matches the manner of Dr. Chung.

A while after our meeting with Dr. Chung, I found an article about Narrative Medicine which is a program of study and, as you can well imagine, has all sorts of relevance for us as AP Langers. I'll share it with you in the fall. 

Blogging Buddy

These New Friends of Chemotherapy and an invitation to meet.

Cause and Effect.  That's what I think when I read this section.

Albert's death leads to Mary's new intensity.

The war leads to a "Channeling of scientific energy" which then leads to Vannevar Bush's argument that scientists must be autonomous in their research which leads to the creation of the National Science Foundation.

Farber and Lasker's need for focused scientific research leads to CCNSC (who names these things?)  which leads to testing of thousands and thousands of synthetic chemicals.

Farber's own investigation leads to "animal cures" which leads to a breakthrough with not just liquid related cancers but tumor related cancers.

Then MJ ( as I think Mia may have abbreviated his name) makes an interesting rhetorical shift.  He juxtaposes the story of Carla and the "attack" on her cancer to parallel the attack launched by Farber and Lasker.  All this time later after Farber's work and struggle with uncertainty, there are all these new drugs but still, the uncertainty exists...30% chance that the treatment will work...

NOW...pay attention to the transition between this chapter and the next....that list of chemicals is significant when you look at the content of the next section.

Will someone please comment on something?  I can see the page views.  I know you are out there.  Is anyone interested in meeting at Northern next week to talk over our progress so far?  Kind of a book study at this point?  I'm thinking Wednesday, July 23, 1:45pm.  I'll bring food.  Email me to rsvp.  It might just be me and my hummus next week, I understand this.  I'm prepared for that.

These new students in AP Lang (Better Title)

Vannevar Bush makes a good argument, I think.  Of course, it runs completely contrary to the scientific research that Lasker and Farber have in mind.  It is, therefore, I think also an argument for moderation in all things.  Balance: times of intense focus and structure and times of creative exploration without boundaries.  Actually, that sounds a lot like AP Lang.  And usually, it is that "creative exploration without boundaries" part that my students struggle with.  They are used to being told exactly how to do something.  They want rubrics.  They are comfortable there.  But the best writing I've ever read did not come from a checklist or a rubric.  And it certainly wasn't a five paragraph essay with a three pronged thesis.  This is a year where I will ask you time and again to find your own answers, to follow your intuition, to be bold and brave in thinking and experimentation.  Some of you will hate it and me for it.  You'll get impatient and frustrated and demand more structure.  You'll mutter things under your breath in class.  You'll shoot each other looks in class that reflect absolute and utter contempt. There will also be times when you are forced so tightly into a structure that you'll contemplate sacrificing a limb to fit inside (that's an exaggeration, of course). Maybe you'll feel a little more comfortable there.  But, it will still challenge you and make you wonder why you thought you had this whole writing thing completely under control.  No one who writes for real ever feels like they have it mastered.  After it is all said and done and the AP test is upon us and you feel (and you will feel this) that there is not possibly one more thing you could do to feel more prepared, you will look back and see your tremendous growth from having managed the balance. At the end of the year, students always write to me about the ways in which this discomfort made them grow as writers and as students. Sometimes, they apologize for those things they muttered under their breath in class.  But if they don't, I 'm okay with it.  And I don't take it personally.  Even if I'm supposed to.

Still Pics of the Mind Map

The Dynamic Duo.

First....did no one watch that video that I labored over for hours and hours and hours?  I have this terrifying feeling that it is so bad that you are speechless?  I am picturing AP lang students staring at the computer screen, eyes glazed over, mouths slightly opened....thinking, "I just don't know what to say."  Or "What exactly have I signed up for?"

Second, and more importantly, Lasker and Farber.  Look out, Cancer.  Here is the kind of reader I am, someone shout at me if this is you.  The minute I read the name "Lady Bird Johnson" I got side tracked into my own personal internet quest to find out the origin of her name and her real name.  Of course, then that led to looking for images to see if what her nanny said was true (unconfirmed) and then the realization that I was not getting the reading done and so then back to the text.  I am interested in hearing about your side tracking.  Especially because your "bird walks" as they are called (coincidence: Lady Bird--ha!  I went on a bird walk about Lady Bird ) can indicate your interest areas which can lead to great topics for writing.  And you will need to find topics for writing this year and compose good research questions.  So, notice the things you notice.  And keep a list of them.  You won't remember them even though you think you will.

I don't have a lot to say about this section.  I think this section is necessary to get us to something else that Mukherjee wants to talk about.

all day long...........

 seriously.

https://drive.google.com/a/fhps.net/file/d/0B0ndMsFKkNibQ3lpZkRSX0pKeUE/edit?usp=sharing

Here's the youtube path:  although, I never know what's going to pop up on there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BNnTphZxbU&feature=em-upload_owner

Thank you, Dylan Malburg.

The House That Jimmy Built

So, this section marks Farber's progress until his meeting with Mary Lasker whom we met in the Prologue.  Basically, Farber has gone as far as he can on his own and with the aid of the Koster. Mukherjee recaps the journey from Farber's basement laboratory to his own hospital.  Out of the darkness and into the light.

My plan for my next entry is to recap Part 1 with a video and some mind mapping. 

The Goodness of Show Business

The beginning of this section reminds me of the technique that directors use when creating a series, say House of Cards or Fargo or Breaking Bad. When one cues up a new episode on Netflix, one must first suffer an introduction that is a brief summary of the action thus far.  This is particularly helpful if a large span of time has occurred between viewings.  However, I tend to marathon my Netflix obsessively watching one episode after another, and so, while I appreciate the intention, it can be a little annoying when cramming in episodes back to back which is what I've been doing with the chapters of Emperor in the last two days in an attempt to catch up from my vacation.  So, as far as the first paragraph goes, I get it, Mr. Mukherjee. In the meantime, in Farber's laboratory.......Thank you.  Excuse my crankiness.   I put myself in this position.

Sweet rhetorical move:  "The suspension of patients inside these iron lungs symbolized the limbolike, paralytic state of polio research" (94).

Another sweet rhetorical move:  the title of this section.  When I first read it I thought it rather "clunky."  And then after reading the note left with the abandoned child, I recognized its double meaning.

Farber's "Go big or go home" attitude with Bill Koster and the Variety Club reminds me of a conversation that I had with Mr. Gregory this summer. I won't bore you with the details, but we were talking about implementing a new program at Northern for which I may or may not be the English teacher, and so I laid out a huge plan with lots of requests for time for research and design.  Let's just say, I did not experience the success that Farber had with Koster.  But,  like MJ said, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." I'm glad it worked out better for Farber.  So much more at stake.

This section is particularly interesting in that it illustrates the idea that science and medicine doesn't exist in a vacuum.  Many disciplines are needed to achieve the goals of science and medicine..language related disciplines....business, marketing, communications.  Farber had to be savvy in these areas, first of all, to recognize that he needed something like the polio campaign to make any progress and then to team up with Koster to build his own campaign. This is especially relevant for those of you entering AP Lang who think of yourselves as "Math/Science" people.  The "Math/Science" people need to be able to write well, to speak effectively, to listen and think critically.  I am always dismayed when I hear that students don't take AP Lang because it "isn't their area."  They are the ones who need it most.  This whole Jimmy episode proves that.

Did anyone notice that Part One starts with Farber in his basement pathology lab and ends with "The emergence of cancer from its basement into the glaring light of publicity..?" (100).

Poisoning the Atmosphere

So, here's my question for this section:  why not just include it in the last?  What makes it deserving of its own title?  I mean, other than the beautiful "fishing expedition" transition on p. 91, and a clever transition with "pickles and mayonnaise" (Aside: did you know that it is the ability to use effective transitions that will increase the coherence and cohesion of your writing and make the people who score standardized testing "oooh" and "aaaah" in wonderment and glee?) and the transition between sections with the words "flickering," "feeble," and "fatal", why not just hitch it to the section before or after it? I ask you.  It's a strange little section.

Poisoning the Atmosphere: #Workingconditions #irony #thirdentry today

Poisoning the Atmosphere

Don't know why this is blank.  Sorry, People.

Dyeing and Dying

For this entry, I thought I might just show you what my notes look like as I read.

Hmmm....nice transitional knife metaphor to link the section on surgery to pharmacological therapy.  Visualize chemo as a tiny knife that cuts out cancer cells.

Definition of specificity: the ability of any medicine to discriminate between its intended target and its host.  Chemistry is cool.

Back to the beginning with the textile industry. 

William Perkin:  "boiling nitric acid and benzene in smuggled glass flasks"  Breaking Bad.

Gideon Harvey, expert in the field of insulting others.    Seems kind of uncalled for to me.  No need to get personal. Jeez.

Vitalism: the belief that the chemistry of living organisms was imbued (nice word) with some mystical property, a vital essence that could not be duplicated in a laboratory.

"Wohler only needed to take a short day-trip from his laboratory in Gottingen to the labs of Frankfort."  Communication between disciplines, between scientists and other professionals is key.  It makes me wonder what other sorts of miracles are sitting on a shelf somewhere waiting for someone to stumble upon them and provide the missing piece to some great discovery.

Ehrlich: "The biological universe was full of molecules picking out their partners like clever locks designed to fit a key; toxins clinging inseparably to antitoxins, dyes that highlighted only particular pairs of cells, chemical stains that could nimbly pick out one class of germs from a mixture of microbes." 
"rant in a train compartment"  "Chemotherapy" was conceptually born in the middle of the night.

"Syphillis--the secret malady."

Ehrlich- magic bullets.

Mustard Gas and the Krumbhaars:  again communication.  I guess it's important to read the "second tier" journals too.

"That their bullet would eventually appear out of that very chemical weapon seemed like a perversion of specific affinity, a ghoulish distortion of Ehrlich's dream" (88).  Circle back to page 38  " A cancer cell is  an astonishing perversion of the normal cell." And page 6, "If we seek immortality , then so, too, in a rather perverse sense sense, does the cancer cell."

So, after taking these notes, I might sit down and type up my blog entry and try to make some sense of what I just read. You might try this same strategy.  It  will produce a valuable set of notes upon which to reflect before test day.

The Hard Tube and the Weak Light

Let me start by saying that this section is a test writer's dream. Mukherjee presents the material in a way that makes it very easy to compose test questions.  For example, the anecdote about Rontgen and his wife would make a nice little essay question as would the bit about the Radium Girls.  Did you know that is a play by the way? I'm ten seconds away from ordering it as I am always curious to see how an author takes a historical event and fleshes it out making characters and a story line come to life.  I am always interested in the author's rhetorical choices which is why I always like to read or watch multiple interpretations of a work.

Another beautiful question could come from the paradox that is radiation therapy: "the promise and the peril".

And then, anytime an author takes the time to list something, that list can very easily be turned into a multiple choice question.  For example, on page 77, Mukherjee discusses the inherent limits of radiation medicine giving the reader obvious cues such as "the first of these limitations" and "the second limit."  That language makes the teacher's job very easy.  The question almost writes itself.

Then, of course, there are all the noteworthy folks in this section who would lend themselves to inclusion in a matching section: Emil Grubbe, Rontgen, the Curies.

And guess who's back: Galen.  After this explanation of surgery and radiation as forms of treatment and the limitations of both, Mukherjee has to get us back to the idea of "systemic" treatment: Chemo.  So, he includes an anecdote about Willy Meyer to transition back to the beginning.  A really nice question might be: Explain the way in which Galen's humor theory of cancer was correct.  And incorrect.  So, look at the parallel we've got going on at the end here.  The paradox of radiation therapy, the "physical penalty" and "mistaken kindness" paradox of surgery and then Galen who was right and wrong at the same time.  This will take us to the "biologic systemic" after treatment idea that Willie Meyer discusses in his letter: chemotherapy.

Best sentence of the section:  "Pierre and Marie......had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism" (74).  Oh, Mukherjee.

I'll end with a question:  Is it possible for one's cheeks to fall out?  Look at the top of page 75 and tell me what you think of that sentence.

Going to Chicago

I'll write at you Friday morning.  I'll cover 73-88 that day.  I'm ready for someone else to volunteer after that.  Don't be shy.  Let me know.

Halstedt

I can't figure out if I am supposed to like him or not.  But, I don't think I do.  I think he would be good friends with Aldous Huxley if the two were to meet. They'd be good bowling partners.  I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't want my surgeon to be a cocaine or morphine addict.  By the time Mukherjee describes him as "tender, almost paternal" on page 66, it's a bit too late for me as a reader to establish a liking for Halstedt even if he does "challenge cancer to duel with his knife" with a vigor unlike anyone else we've met up until this point.

If "mistaken kindness" was about leaving too much cancerous tissue behind, I think the same term could be applied to Halstedt and the "physical penalty"that his patients paid.  That is, depending on his motivation. But I must admit, by the time Mukherjee explains Halstedt's "conceptual error," I feel a bit sorry for him.  How could he have known? Shortly after I am thrown back again into the Halstedt Haters Camp because he and his students "clutched to their theories" so "adamantly".  I just don't know what to think about that guy.

More later.

"Remote Sympathy"

So, Mukherjee opens with the short narrative about Hunter and the surgical success he had with "movable cancers"  in order to introduce the two problems that surgeons had prior to 1846 and the solutions to those problems.  Thank goodness for William Morton and his little glass vaporizer, first of all.  But, I think the thing that is most noteworthy about this section is the way that Joseph Lister takes the work of someone else--Pasteur-- and uses logic to reach a conclusion about infection.  And then, of course, the impact of these two discoveries on the treatment of cancer goes without saying.  Mukherjee, ever the obliging author, takes the reader one step further in his explanation of the impact of these two discoveries by way of a  comparative example: surgeon and musician, Theodor Billroth.  With the discoveries of anesthesia and antiseptic, Billroth was able to to do much more invasive surgery than Hunter who could only offer "remote sympathy."

"But what if the whole of cancer could be uprooted at its earliest stage using the most definitive surgery conceivable?"

Spoiler Alert:  This entire section shows us the progression of the treatment of cancer, but it also sets the reader up for a very "radical" approach in the treatment of breast cancer.  I mean, hey, as long as we have antiseptic and anesthetic, let's try to "uproot" the cancer no matter how much of the patient we might have to sacrifice.  Right?  Thankfully, today, although a woman diagnosed with breast cancer may still have to undergo a complete mastectomy, it is not the "go to" procedure.  There are other, more conservative, treatments as you will find out.

I like to envision Mukherjee setting up this part of the text.  I imagine his thought process.  "Okay.  We have to talk about Halstedt next.  But in order to get to Halstedt, the audience needs to know about advances in the field of surgery itself and how those advances would inform or allow Halstedt's radical ideas.  So, I need an example pre-antiseptic and pre-anesthetic and then I need a post-antiseptic and post anesthetic example (enter Hunter and Billroth) so that the reader can understand how Halstedt's idea would then be an acceptable choice."  Of course, I am not sure that that is what he was thinking, but given the evidence in the text, I think it is a reasonable theory.  What do you think?

Can you tell I'm sleepy tonight?  I just said goodbye to the last of the in-laws who were here as guests in the house for five days.  On the 4th of July there were 27 people in this house.  They ate 32 hot dogs, four lbs of burger, two boxes of pasta salad, two giant cans of baked beans, a half of a sheet cake, two pies, two large bags of chips, an entire vegetable tray, except for the broccoli and the cauliflower (why does no one ever eat that part?), eight liters of soda.....it was like the descent of the locusts.  Not going to lie, it was five days of fun, but a lot of work.  A lot of work.  I meant to say that twice.  I am the head chef.  I can't imagine the mutiny around here if I were to suggest a bowl of cereal for dinner.  I'm exhausted and my husband is telling me we might want to go into the basement now because apparently there is a weather situation brewing? Which means I'll have to haul the rabbit cage downstairs so that my 6 six year old doesn't freak out about the safety of the family pet.  His name is Bon Bon.  He's French, so plug your nose when you say his name.   So, there you have it.  Goodnight all.  I promise a more energized entry tomorrow :)

Thank you, Owen Purdue. Who is next?

Onkos

Immediately what stands out to me in this chapter, (as they do in most) are the beginning quotations. Mukherjee’s prolific use of quotations in the book is one of my favorite things about his work. They pull you in, make you think deeply. Anyways, the ones at the beginning of ‘Onkos’ are very good. We have Galen, the famous follower of Hippocrates’ ‘four humours’ theory. He said this in 130 AD: Black bile without boiling causes cancers. It’s hard to understand what he means, and I was left with a lot of questions after reading this quotation: what is black bile? How does it form into cancer? In any case I moved on.

The next quotation is much more poignant. We have learned nothing, therefore, about the real cause of Cancer or its actual nature. We are where the Greeks were. That last statement is highlighted simply because it is so poignant. Francis Wood said this in 1914, over two millennia after Hippocrates and the first description of Karkinos. That statement, in its beautiful simplicity, tells us of the unknowably complicated mechanisms of cancer. Cancer is so intricate, so huge and massive and unknowable, that even in the 20th century we were only at the tip of the iceberg in our understanding of it. That statement again makes cancer real to the reader.  

Mukherjee hits hard with a final, poignant statement: In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does- by perceiving, naming, and responding to it. This quotation confirms the inevitable, that confirmation bias (denying bad news) is human nature. It makes me think about what I would do if I was diagnosed with cancer. I would probably try to deny it as long as I could. This is not my fault. I, after all, am only human.

On to the actual text, where we are forced to confront the question ‘what’s in a name?’ Well, in a name is precisely this: potential. If it’s a person, it could be the potential to smile at old memories or frown in disgust. The same goes for just about anything….Except illnesses. There are famous names in the world of medicine: HIV/AIDS, influenza, ebola, smallpox, (yes it has been eradicated, but who of us hasn’t considered an apocalyptic resurgence?) and of course, cancer.

These are the names that send chills down the spine, names that give meaning to the word fear. And as Mukherjee tells us in the opening paragraph of the chapter, to name an illness is to give it literary weight. A great piece of wisdom here: A patient, long before he becomes the subject of medical scrutiny, is, at first, simply a storyteller, a narrator of suffering. Quite awesome.

Mukherjee then takes us on an etymological tour of medicine. We see here how much we really owe to the romans and greeks. Tuberculosis, influenza, and now cancer: we all see what’s behind their names. In telling us about the origins of these names, Mukherjee uses his signature device to keep us interested in the story: he changes the time in history. The last chapter was all about the beginning, and discovery of cancer: this one seems to be about the naming of the disease and its very first scientific hypothesis. And if you’ll flip the page back, you can see we left off first in 1990 with Aufderheide and then in 1940, as cancer ‘ratcheted its way to second on the list’. Now, here we are again, back in 400 BC with Hippocrates and the genesis of the four humour theory. We learn in this chapter the reason there’s a crab on the cover of the book: to the first man who described it, Hippocrates, cancer was the sharp, rough shell of a crab, and the tumors not single, isolated metastasized outcroppings but legs reaching out around the body. And so it was, that here today in 2014 there is a crab on the cover of the book. The title of the chapter is credited to the Greek word for ‘mass’ or ‘load’: onkos, from which the modern discipline of oncology takes its name. Mukherjee reminds us, though, that Hippocrates description covered not just cancer, but included every other tumor: lumps lumped indiscriminately into the same category of pathology. There was a bit of english magic at the beginning of this clause, did you notice it? Hopefully.

Next we hear of the ‘four humors’ hypothesis, theorized by Hippocrates and picked up by Galen a couple centuries later. For every illness there was a liquid explanation, but for cancer, there was one perfectly in synch more with the future than the past: that cancer was a malevolent, evil disease; that it came hand in hand with depression, darkness, and death. Here is a metaphor with some of the deepest roots in all of medical history. It tells us that the chill we feel when we think of cancer is the same one that has been chilling people for all of human history. This may be a short chapter, but there is a lot of material here. It’s also worth mentioning that we get the name of the section (Of Black Cholor, Without Boyling) from a quotation by Thomas Gale, english surgeon, describing the cancer hypothesis of Galen.

But perhaps because of the humor theory, the treatment of cancer took a step back. Because tumors were now believed to be caused by black bile, the potential of successfully excising them was...Next to nothing. ‘The problem with treating cancer surgically, Galen suggested, was that black bile was everywhere, as inevitable and pervasive as any fluid. You could cut cancer out, but the bile would flow right back, like sap seeping through the limbs of a tree.’ And that is where we leave cancer research for a long, long time. Almost 1500 years will pass before the humor theory is finally discredited. Mukherjee throws in some of his trademark visuals here, describing the painful tradition of medieval surgery, and gives us part of the reason cancer treatment was left to a standstill for a millenium and a half: that surgery was often life-threatening.

Suddenly, on the last page, we are met with a flurry of one of the rhetorical devices Siddhartha Mukherjee loves best: anaphora. With little restraint he lists off a dozen or so of the medieval ‘cures’, showing us just how far medieval patients would go to find a cure for their tumors. What is the purpose of this veritable apothecary? Perhaps to tell us exactly the lengths patients exhausted before succumbing to their diseases or the operation of a surgeon. Indeed, it’s really only a sampling of the amount of drugs available to people now and the ones that were available to them then.  Mukherjee ends the chapter with a final metaphor: that the human body with its surplus of ‘black bile’ was like an overfull sponge. It’s a metaphor that’s eerily reminiscent of Mukherjee’s description of leukemia at the beginning of the book: much like black bile, white blood cells saturate the leukemic body with cancerous ‘blasts’. Maybe Galen wasn’t so far off the mark after all?

Vanishing Humors

Info:	Significance:
- In 1533, a student named Andreas Vesalius arrived at the University of Paris.	- He hoped to learn Galenic medicine, but would end up disproving Galen entirely.
-When he arrived, he found that the University’s surgical program was neglected and in disarray.	- He resolved to teach himself the principles of anatomy without the help of the university.
-Vesalius began to visit graveyards around Paris, looking for subjects...	-From which to make his own anatomical map.
-He began to chart out arteries, veins, and nerves.	-Soon, though, he was forced to confront a major hole in Galen’s hypothesis. Galen had mentioned to the readers of his works that in order to cure disease one would have to bleed patients from the arteries that led ‘straight into’ the tumor. But what defined ‘straight into’?
-Because of that question, Galen set out sketching every nerve and artery in the human body.	- Soon he was charting out the nerves and many other systems. Nowhere, however, could he find the ‘Black bile’ of cancer. Though he would succeed in his mission of mapping out the body, he would never formally declare himself against Galen’s principles. The fact that black bile didn’t exist, however, always lurked in the back of his mind.
- 250 years later, in 1793, Matthew Baillie would publish a counter to Galen’s study, in which instead of showing healthy anatomy, he drew the anatomy of the ill.	-Here was the finale of the search for Galen’s black bile. Surely, if black bile was present, it would be present in something it was supposed to have caused, cancerous tumors.
-Baillie sketched out several types of cancer. But none of them contained black bile.	-It was concluded by the scientific community that black bile, and Galen’s four humor hypothesis, did not exist.

Happy Fourth of July!!!!!

Guest blogger tomorrow!!!!!

So, today I got the inside scoop from a member of the Harvard College Admissions Board and the Harvard College Medical School Admissions Board (not sure if that is what it is called exactly).  The undergrad board member told me that the number one trait that he looks for in an applicant's admission essay is sincerity, an authentic and effective writing voice in an essay that is well-organized with a clear thesis.  The med school person told me that the quality of writing on an applicant's personal statement can make or break his/her application.

Interesting.

A Private Plague: Other content

Here are Mukherjee's quotations:

"We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature."....Augustus and his cigarette.

"Now it is cancer's turn to be the disease that doesn't knock before it enters." Susan Sontag

Here's a quotation I'd like to add.....

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" -William Butler Yeats 

And I'd like to give you the following page numbers: 259, 286, 289, 459. An interesting rhetorical choice occurs on these pages.  For an English teacher's idea of fun, see if you can figure out what it is.  Oh, and why it is so subtly beautiful. It's okay to be wrong, by the way.  It's not okay to not be wrong because you didn't take a risk and give it your best educated guess.  I mean, where is the growth in that?

This chapter seems to me to look at cancer through the lens of literary criticism with its discussion of "the disease of poets", the comparison of the two diseases and the ways in which each is reflective of its age. That would make a great essay question.  I'll have to remember that.

Mukherjee circles back again to Virchow in his explanation of omnis cellula e cellula (TFIOS). Hint:  if the teacher mentions people, terms and events in her writing of the summer blog....it would probably be a good idea to hold yourself accountable for knowing all about those people, terms and events. He sets us up to go way back in time to the first recorded documentation of cancer...on papyrus, of course, the teachings of Imhotep, the story of Atossa.

The most important thing about this chapter is that we get an explanation for why, all of a sudden, it seems like cancer is moving up to the top of the list of diseases that kill. But what we get with all the history is as Mukherjee concludes, "the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy" (45).

Your thoughts?  Reactions?  Ideas?  What does this section make you think?

A [not so] Private Plague

Does the literal definition of metastasis seem like an understatement to anyone else? It does to me. 
I'd like to linger a minute there and on the idea of the "clonally evolving disease" to deliver some news.  Some of you may know Ms. Engelhardt, science teacher at Northern High.  Many of you may not know that she and I are close friends. I have been close to her side through two rounds of trying to cut out or obliterate "clonally evolving" cells through surgeries and chemotherapy.  Metastasis: literally "beyond stillness."  Hmph.  I asked her if I could talk about her in this blog with all of you.  She was all for it.  Through all of her struggles with cancer, she has made it her personal mission to educate people, to share her experiences and to find something positive, some light in the dark.

The thing is that when a person receives news in the privacy of the oncologist's office, the same news....again, for the third time, it can be difficult to make the private public, to share news with those who have stood beside you time and again, to let them know that once again the troops must be rallied and the ammunition must be gathered.

So, this phenomenon that Mukherjee describes, "Every generation of cancer cells creates a small number of cells that is genetically different from its parents.When a chemotherapeutic drug or the immune system attacks cancer, mutant clones that can resist the attack grow out.  The fittest cancer cell survives", today I'm wondering if this is what's going on with Ms. Engelhardt.  Her cancer it seems has evolved in this way. This coming Monday and Wednesday I will be accompanying her to a series of appointments to learn about the ammunition that will be used this time. She wants people to know.  She doesn't mind if people talk about it or talk with her about it. The hardest part for her was informing people....again.  So, hopefully, this blog entry makes all of that a bit easier.  It might be difficult  for some of you to know what to say at this point.  If that is the case, but you want to talk further, you can always email me.  Or you could email Ms. Engelhardt.  Throughout this journey, she has always welcomed and accepted open discussion and support from anyone who is comfortable giving it.

More on the actual content of this section later.

Farber's Gauntlet

So, the reason that I am a bit behind now is that I issued a challenge to Jessi Singh who had sent me an email expressing his concern about the kind of notes he was taking.  The challenge was to write the next blog entry and he took me up on it.  So, it was only fair to give him a little time to do that. You can find his notes here.

I think Jesse deserves an "Atta Boy" for being willing to take this risk.  As you can see, he did an excellent job of summarizing the main ideas of this section demonstrating his comprehension of the main ideas in the text.  The thing I find most noteworthy is that Jesse has outlined a cause and effect analysis of the contents. I think that one of the coolest things that could happen this summer is for each of you to find one or two study partners and take turns taking notes in this way and then for all of you to discuss them somehow.  Discuss the different things that each of you noticed as important that might have been left out of the notes, etc.  What a great way to internalize what you've read.  In the meantime, I'd welcome another guest blogger here.  It is waaaaaaay more fun to read what my future students write than for me to read my own thoughts.

You may have noticed that this section contains the narrative of the boy to whom Mukherjee dedicated the book.  If I were to guess, I wonder if, in part, the reason for that is that Farber's work with Sandler was the first case of a remission which marks a turning point in the history of cancer.  This section is kind of painful to read as it horrifies me to think of people being injected with chemicals (prior to the Nuremberg consent code) without their knowledge or if they are minors without the knowledge of their parents or guardians.  Yikes.

Absolutely my favorite part of this section, however, is  Mukherjee's rhetorical analysis of the paper mentioned in Jesse's notes.  A rhetorical analysis is an analysis of the tools that a writer uses to get his ideas across.  It notes the date of publication, the structure, the organization, text features, modes of discourse, the style of diction (word choice), the length, the tone, the purpose, the message or argument. 

Length: seven pages
Published: June 3, 1948
Features: "packed with tables, figures, microscope photographs,  laboratory values and blood counts
Diction: starched, formal, detached and scientific yet exciting
" Yet like all great medical papers, it was a page-turner.  And like all good novels, it was timeless: to read it today is to be pitched behind the scenes into the tumultuous life of the Boston clinic....."
Message: Cancer, even in its most aggressive form, had been treated with a medicine, a chemical.
Tone:  Hopeful "He was throwing down a gauntlet for cancer medicine."

Well, this worked beautifully.  Jesse helped pick out the important facts and then I was able to layer on some of the stuff we will be working on no matter the text in AP Lang.  Anyone up for taking on the next section?  A Private Plague? Hopefully, you won't look at the challenge as your own private plague.  Let me know.  Soon.  Otherwise, I'll be back tomorrow. 

For those of you who may be getting annoyed with the fact that we are a bit behind the seven pages, you can keep plugging away.  The blog will then be a nice daily review for you.  Honestly, all my in-laws are coming into town to stay with us tomorrow and I am doing the best I can to keep all the balls in the air at this point :)

Have a great night.