Here death may deal not again for ever;
Here change may come not till all change end.
From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,
Who have left nought living to ravage and rend.
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,
While the sun and the rain live, these shall be ;
Till a last wind’s breath upon all these blowing
Roll the sea.
Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.
Algernon Swinburne "A Forsaken Garden"
Herodotus in his Histories briefly tells of Atossa, the Queen of Persia.
She lived in the fifth century BCE and was the daughter of Cyrus and the wife of Darius, sucessive Achaemenid emperors who ruled over vast swathes of territory in what is now called the 'Middle East'; it stretched from the Turkish coast on the Mediterranean to modern day Iran. In the middle of her reign, she noticed a bleeding lump on her breast.
Now, being the wife and daughter of breathtakingly brutal and effective emperors, she could have had retinues of the finest physicians from the civilized world, from Greece to India, flocking to her bedside and fighting to treat her. But instead she does something very uncharacteristic of someone in her position: She descends into a fierce and impenetrable loneliness, wraps herself in a sheet and eventually allows her devoted slave, a Greek named Democedes to excise the tumor.
We don't know how long she lives after that episode, but short term she recovers, and filled with gratitude toward Democedes, persuades her husband the emperor, who had been thinking of launching a campaign against the Scythians on the Eastern border of the empire, to turn westward and invade Greece. The following series of Greco-Persian epics would constitute one of the founding events of Western history, still resonant with us today (see the movie '300'). Thus, far from Helen of Troy's lovely face, it may be said that what launched a thousand ships was the breast tumor on one very powerful and very frightened woman, whose lofty position did not immunize her from the dreaded disease of karkinos as the greeks called it.
So let us explore this disease, Onkos, (from the Greek for 'burden', from which derives the modern 'oncology'); the cancer, with Siddartha Mukerjee, a practicing oncologist from Boston, in his pulitzer prizewinning and magisterial work "The Emperor of All Maladies: A biography of Cancer. Come with me past the orange curtain and learn about this empire, and my epigram from Swinburne