Sometimes it's hard to know what to say, or how to help when a friend or family member has been diagnosed with cancer. 
There are the physical effects – especially around how the disease can affect day-to-day life – and the emotional roller coaster that often starts from spotting the first worrying sign until given the all clear, or advised we’re in remission.

After all everyone, being unique individuals will cope differently – and we can feel lost and frightened for them.

Some – not all - people living with cancer or caring for them may draw comfort from a book called The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee an American oncologist. He set out to write a history of cancer – but it became a biography of the disease – and won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2011. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, that’s for sure.

The softback edition could be used as a doorstop for one – and the sheer volume of information is unfortunately enough to put a lot of people off. But for those who like information and want to know more there’s a lot here. Mukherjee describes probably the earliest recorded case of breast cancer to 3,000 – 2,500 B.C.. Papyrus scrolls provide authentic accounts of breast cancer. A case - attributable to Imhotep, the Egyptian physician-architect - was deemed incurable if the disease was “cool to touch, bulging and spread all over the breast”. 

Chimney sweeps' carcinoma was first detected in 1775 and has the distinction of being the first reported form of occupational cancer. It is actually a squamous cell carcinoma of the skin of the scrotum. Warts caused by the irritation from soot particles, if not excised, developed into a scrotal cancer.

This eventually proceeded up the spermatic cord into the abdomen where it would prove fatal. It primarily affected chimney sweeps in their late teens and early twenties who had been in contact with soot since their early childhood and was principally a British phenomenon; in Germany, for example, sweeps wore tight-fitting protective clothing which prevented the soot from accumulating on the lower surface of the scrotum, whereas boys in the UK were once sent up the chimneys wearing only trousers and shirt, and occasionally naked.

So if you find this kind of background and context interesting and comforting then this is the book for you. Mukherjee also describes the search throughout the 20th Century for a cure as it was believed one cure would fit all cancers. Which of course we now know isn’t true.

The Emperor of All Maladies certainly brings home to you how far we’ve come and that our chances of living with and beating the disease are better now than they have been at any time in history.