"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 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?
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?
At first, I was really stunned when Mukherjee suggested that cancer is "quite possibly the oldest" disease "seen in a human specimen" (Mukherjee 43). However, after he explained that cancer is "an age related disease" (Mukherjee 44), I began to think about the age requirements for cancer checks. Women usually start getting mammograms at age 40, and colonoscopies often take place later in life. After I read more, it became clear to me why cancer wasn't a leading killer in past generations. The life expectancy used to be much lower than it is now due to poor hygiene, other diseases, and more. Since the odds of having cancer increase with age, people that died young weren't at a high risk of getting this disease. That is one reason why "'the early history of cancer... is that there is very little early history of cancer'"(Muhkerjee 44). It also made me wonder that if future generations "cure" cancer will a new disease take its place as a top killer?
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting, Emily. Lately, it seems that I am hearing of cancer more and more. Of course, I fall into that forty something age bracket . That last part of your post is haunting. It feels as though there will always be something to plague mankind....
ReplyDeleteOn a more positive note, nice work internalizing what you've read.
I found that Mukherjee expresses why cancer is a lead disease best by saying,"...it becomes only when all other killers themselves have been killed" (Mukherjee 44). This is due to the fact that we have used vaccines and modern medicine to cure previous diseases that were (known) preventable. This created a problem though: if contractible diseases were cured, then cancer would become more common among deadly diseases. This had both positive and negative ends to it.
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