textbook. The forty-eight cases in the papyrus—fractures of the hand, gaping abscesses of the skin, or shattered skull bones—are treated as medical conditions rather than occult phenomena, each with its own anatomical glossary, diagnosis, summary, and prognosis.
And it is under these clarifying headlamps of an ancient surgeon that cancer first emerges as a distinct disease. Describing case forty-five103, Imhotep advises, “If you examine [a case] having bulging masses on [the] breast and you find that they have spread over his breast; if you place your hand upon [the] breast [and] find them to be cool, there being no fever at all therein when your hand feels him; they have no granulations, contain no fluid, give rise to no liquid discharge, yet they feel protuberant to your touch, you should say concerning him: ‘This is a case of bulging masses I have to contend with. . . . Bulging tumors of the breast mean the existence of swellings on the breast, large, spreading, and hard; touching them is like touching a ball of wrappings, or they may be compared to the unripe hemat fruit, which is hard and cool to the touch.’ ”
A “bulging mass in the breast”—cool, hard, dense as a hemat fruit, and spreading insidiously under the skin—could hardly be a more vivid description of breast cancer. Every case in the papyrus was followed by a concise discussion of treatments, even if only palliative: milk poured through the ears of neurosurgical patients, poultices for wounds, balms for burns. But with case forty-five, Imhotep fell atypically silent. Under the section titled “Therapy,” he offered only a single sentence: “There is none.”
With that admission of impotence, cancer virtually disappeared from ancient medical history. Other diseases cycled violently through the globe, leaving behind their cryptic footprints in legends and documents. A furious febrile plague104—typhus, perhaps—blazed through the port city of Avaris in 1715 BC, decimating its population. Smallpox erupted volcanically in pockets, leaving its telltale pockmarks105 on the face of Ramses V in the twelfth century BC. Tuberculosis rose and ebbed106 through the Indus valley like its seasonal floods. But if cancer existed in the interstices of these massive epidemics, it existed in silence, leaving no easily identifiable trace in the medical literature—or in any other literature.
More than two millennia pass after Imhotep’s description until we once more hear of cancer. And again, it is an illness cloaked in silence, a private shame. In his sprawling Histories,107 written around 440 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus records the story of Atossa, the queen of Persia, who was suddenly struck by an unusual illness. Atossa was the daughter of Cyrus, and the wife of Darius, successive Achaemenid emperors of legendary brutality who ruled over a vast stretch of land from Lydia on the Mediterranean Sea to Babylonia on the Persian Gulf. In the middle of her reign, Atossa noticed a bleeding lump in her breast that may have arisen from a particularly malevolent form of breast cancer labeled inflammatory (in inflammatory breast cancer, malignant cells invade the lymph glands of the breast, causing a red, swollen mass).
If Atossa had desired it, an entire retinue of physicians from Babylonia to Greece would have flocked to her bedside to treat her. Instead, she descended into a fierce and impenetrable loneliness. She wrapped herself in sheets, in a self-imposed quarantine. Darius’ doctors may have tried to treat her, but to no avail. Ultimately, a Greek slave named Democedes persuaded her to allow him to excise the tumor.
Soon after that operation, Atossa mysteriously vanishes from Herodotus’ text. For him, she is merely a minor plot twist. We don’t know whether the tumor recurred, or how or when she died, but the procedure was at least a temporary success. Atossa lived, and she had Democedes to thank for it. And that reprieve from pain and illness whipped her into a frenzy of gratitude and territorial ambition. Darius had been planning a campaign against Scythia, on the eastern border of his empire. Goaded by Democedes, who wanted to return to his native Greece, Atossa pleaded with her husband to turn his campaign westward—to invade Greece. That turn of the Persian empire from east to west, and the series of Greco-Persian wars that followed, would mark one of the definitive moments in the early history of the West. It was Atossa’s tumor, then, that quietly launched a thousand ships. Cancer, even as a clandestine illness, left its fingerprints on the ancient world.
But Herodotus and Imhotep are storytellers, and like all stories, theirs have gaps and inconsistencies. The “cancers” described by them may have been true neoplasms, or perhaps they were hazily describing abscesses, ulcers, warts, or moles. The only incontrovertible cases of cancer in history are those in which the malignant tissue has somehow been preserved. And to encounter one such cancer face-to-face—to actually stare the ancient illness in its eye—one needs to journey to a thousand-year-old gravesite in a remote, sand-swept plain in the southern tip of Peru.
The plain lies at the northern edge of the Atacama Desert, a parched, desolate six-hundred-mile strip caught in the leeward shadow of the giant furl of the Andes that stretches from southern Peru into Chile. Brushed continuously by a warm, desiccating wind, the terrain hasn’t seen rain in recorded history. It is hard to imagine that human life once flourished here, but it did. The plain is strewn with hundreds of graves—small, shallow pits dug out of the clay, then lined carefully with rock. Over the centuries, dogs, storms, and grave robbers have dug out these shallow graves, exhuming history.
The graves contain the mummified remains of members of the Chiribaya tribe. The Chiribaya made no effort to preserve their dead, but the climate is almost providentially perfect for mummification. The clay leaches water and fluids out of the body from below, and the wind dries the tissues from above. The bodies, often placed seated, are thus swiftly frozen in time and space.
In 1990, one such large desiccated gravesite containing about 140 bodies caught the attention of Arthur Aufderheide, a professor at the University of Minnesota in Duluth. Aufderheide is a pathologist by training but his specialty is paleopathology, a study of ancient specimens. His autopsies, unlike Farber’s, are not performed on recently living patients, but on the mummified remains found on archaeological sites. He stores these human specimens in small, sterile milk containers in a vaultlike chamber in Minnesota. There are nearly five thousand pieces of tissue, scores of biopsies, and hundreds of broken skeletons in his closet.
At the Chiribaya site108, Aufderheide rigged up a makeshift dissecting table and performed 140 autopsies over several weeks. One body revealed an extraordinary finding. The mummy was of a young woman in her midthirties, found sitting, with her feet curled up, in a shallow clay grave. When Aufderheide examined her, his fingers found a hard “bulbous mass” in her left upper arm. The papery folds of skin, remarkably preserved, gave way to that mass, which was intact and studded with spicules of bone. This, without question, was a malignant bone tumor, an osteosarcoma, a thousand-year-old cancer preserved inside of a mummy. Aufderheide suspects that the tumor had broken through the skin while she was still alive. Even small osteosarcomas can be unimaginably painful. The woman’s pain, he suggests, must have been blindingly intense.
Aufderheide isn’t the only paleopathologist to have found cancers in mummified specimens. (Bone tumors, because they form hardened and calcified tissue, are vastly more likely to survive over centuries and are best preserved.) “There are other cancers found in mummies where the malignant tissue has been preserved. The oldest of these is an abdominal cancer from Dakhleh in Egypt from about four hundred AD,” he said. In other cases, paleopathologists have not found the actual tumors, but rather signs left by the tumors in the body. Some skeletons were riddled with tiny holes created by cancer in the skull or the shoulder bones, all arising from metastatic
