Tale of Two Illnesses
The disease we have been calling as leukemia (blood cancer) for ages now was once known as the suppuration of blood. In case you were wondering “suppuration” meant “spoiling” (in this case, spoilt to become a pus). So what, you must be thinking, it’s just a name change, how does it matter? Except that the choice of name had unintended consequences, writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Emperor of All Maladies : “An illness, at the moment of its discovery, is a fragile idea, a hothouse flower – deeply, disproportionately influenced by names and classifications.” The term “suppuration of blood” suggested the root cause was that blood was getting spoilt. Whereas it was just a description of what was being observed. A key difference. That “humility of the (new) name” was transformative. Once we start from “We don’t know”, we are open to all options. Mukherjee points out that our understanding of another disease, a century later, got transformed similarly when we renamed it. F...