The first medical description of cancer was found in an Egyptian text originally written in 2500 BC: “a bulging tumor in [the] breast . . . like touching a ball of wrappings.” Discussing treatment, the ancient scribe noted: “[There] is none.”

The anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) tried to discover the source for black bile, the fluid thought to be responsible for cancer. Unable to find it, Vesalius launched a new search for cancer’s real cause and cure.

Medieval surgeons attacked cancer using primitive surgical methods. Johannes Scultetus (1595–1645) describes a mastectomy, the surgical removal of breast cancer, using fire, acid and leather bindings.

Between 1800 and 1900, surgeons devised increasingly aggressive operations to attack the roots of cancer in the body. In the 1890s, William Stewart Halsted at Johns Hopkins University devised the radical mastectomy—an operation to extirpate the breast, the muscles beneath the breast and the associated lymph nodes.

“The patient was a young lady whom I was loath to disfigure,” Halsted wrote. In this etching, Halsted presented an idealized patient. Real cancer patients tended to be older women with larger tumors, far less able to withstand this radical attack.

When radium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie, oncologists and surgeons began to deliver high doses of radiation to tumors. Yet radiation was itself carcinogenic: Marie Curie died from a leukemia caused by decades of X-ray exposure.

During World War Two, hundreds of tons of mustard gas were released on the Bari harbor in Italy during an air raid. The gas decimated normal white blood cells in the body, leading pharmacologists to fantasize about using a similar chemical to kill cancers of white blood cells. Chemotherapy—chemical warfare on cancer cells—was inspired, literally, by war.

In 1947, Sidney Farber discovered a folic acid analog called aminopterin that killed rapidly dividing cells in the bone marrow. Using aminopterin, Farber obtained brief, tantalizing remissions in acute lymphoblastic leukemia. One of Farber’s first patients was two-year-old Robert Sandler.

From her all-white apartment in New York City, Mary Lasker, a legendary entrepreneur, socialite, lobbyist and advocate, helped launch a national battle against cancer. Lasker would become the “fairy godmother” of cancer research; she would coax and strong-arm the nation to initiate a War on Cancer.

Farber’s patient, Einar Gustafson—known as “Jimmy”—a baseball fan, became the unofficial mascot for children’s cancer. The Jimmy Fund, founded in 1948, was one of the most powerful cancer advocacy organizations, with Ted Williams a vocal supporter.

Sidney Farber, Lasker’s confidant, mentor and co-conspirator, provided medical legitimacy to the War on Cancer and oversaw the building of a new cancer ward in Boston.

At the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in the 1960s physicians Emil Frei

Emil Freireich forged a strategy to cure acute lymphoblastic leukemia using highly toxic drugs.

Henry Kaplan, a physician-scientist, used radiation therapy to cure Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The cures of lymphoblastic leukemia and Hodgkin’s lymphoma invigorated the War on Cancer, raising the possibility of Farber’s “universal cure.”

Inspired by the early victories of chemotherapy, cancer advocates, led by Lasker and Farber, urged the nation to launch a War on Cancer. In 1970, the Laskerites published a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, coaxing Nixon to support their war.

Many scientists criticized the War on Cancer as premature, arguing that a political cure would not lead to a medical cure.

Lasker’s use of canny advertising and potent imagery still inspires generations of advocates, including Greenpeace.

In 1775, the London surgeon Percivall Pott observed that scrotal cancer occurred disproportionately in adolescent chimney sweeps, and proposed a link between soot and scrotal cancer, launching the hunt for preventable carcinogens in the environment.

Innovative studies in the 1950s established the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Yet early warning labels affixed on packages in the 1960s avoided the word “cancer.” Explicit warning labels were not required until decades later.

Although smoking rates have fallen in most developed nations, active marketing and bold political lobbying allows the tobacco industry to flourish in others, creating a new generation of smokers (and of future cancer victims).

Harold Varmus and J. Michael Bishop discovered that cancer is caused not by exogenous viruses, but by the activation of endogenous precursor genes that exist in all normal cells. Cancer, Varmus wrote, is a “distorted version” of our normal selves.

Working with collaborators across the globe, Robert Weinberg, of MIT, discovered distorted genes in mouse and human cancer cells.

Scientists have sequenced the entire genome (all 23,000 genes), making it possible to document every genetic change (relative to normal genes). Dots represent mutations in genes found in colon cancer, with commonly mutated genes becoming “hills” and then “mountains.”

In the 1990s, Barbara Bradfield was among the first women to be treated with a drug, Herceptin, that specifically attacks breast cancer cells. She is the longest survivor of that treatment, with no hint of her cancer remaining.