James Le Fanu
Costs of a Cure
The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine’s Deepest Mystery
By George Johnson
The Bodley Head 284pp £18.99
Medicine, over the past fifty years, has metamorphosed from a modest pursuit of limited effectiveness into a massive global phenomenon employing millions and costing hundreds of billions. Now, in the vast shiny palaces that modern hospitals have become, previously unimaginable goals such as transplanting organs have become routine, while every year tens of thousands doomed to blindness from cataracts or immobility from crippling arthritis have their sight and movement restored. Medicine has become the most visible example of the fulfilment of the great enlightenment project in which scientific progress vanquishes the twin evils of ignorance and suffering for the benefit of all.
So medicine works – with one obvious glaring exception: the treatment of cancer. To be sure, some forms – such as the leukaemias and lymphomas that affect children – are curable with a combination of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, but for the vast majority the comment more than twenty years ago
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm