The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) Read Online Free PDF Page B

waist. Both children shared the same dark complexion and rounded black eyes of the man in the photo beside them. I wondered if the teenagers were twins.
    I examined the photos on the desk for a moment and then glanced into the golden face and cat-like green eyes of Alyssa Iacovani. Her eyes, too, fell to the photographs for an instant before returning to meet mine.
    “Would you like to see the document?” she asked.
    Alyssa switched on the desktop computer and sat back in her chair for a moment while the aging machine hummed to life. She clicked with the mouse, and across the room a printer began to whirr.
    She stood to snatch up a single page and then handed it to me. “This is the English translation of that section of the scroll I was telling you about. This is what I showed Jeff. The original is much, much longer.
    “Each of these texts spans many papyrus scrolls; the ancients were wordy, to say the least. Furthermore, many of the scrolls are horribly fragmented. As researchers, we are tasked with piecing together the full-scale works. This aspect of antiquities research is quite literally the assembly of a large jigsaw puzzle…”
    As I read and re-read the document, I barely heard her.
     

    I have in my charge the care of ten, all stricken with the plague of the crabs.
     
    Agariste and I created two extra beds from the feathers of pigeon to accommodate the six men. The gods granted the comfort of more spacious surroundings to the four poor women in the adjacent room, but they wail without stopping nonetheless.
     
    All ten of my charges have failed the scalpel and the fire drill. Their tumors continue to grow. The crabs continue to devour them.
     

    “Excuse me,” I said. “Wasn’t it Hippocrates who coined the word ‘cancer,’ meaning something about crabs?”
    Alyssa looked impressed. “Yes, it was!” she said. “Cancer, carcinoma, carcinogen… all of these words descend from karkinos , the ancient Greek for ‘crab.’ Hippocrates’ hypothesis of cancer, that it was caused by an excess of ‘black bile,’ remained fairly unchanged from about 450 BCE all the way until the Renaissance.”
    “And did the word tumors , as used here, have the same meaning in the ancient world that it has today?”
    “Essentially,” Alyssa said. “Of course the ancients’ descriptions reflect a lack of technology—so any deformity of the skin or other imperfection that resembles a tumor will have been written as such. But true tumors have been documented in ancient papyri for thousands of years. The first known case study is a papyrus scroll from ancient Egypt, known today as the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus after the man who found it. The scroll dates to 1600 BCE but is believed to be a copy of much older texts. It describes breast cancer—in men, oddly enough. The ancients could even distinguish between malignant and benign, based predominantly on the same gross differences in tumor composition that are still utilized for preliminary assessment today.”
    “Vascularization, asymmetry, et cetera?” I asked, and Alyssa nodded.
    “And recurrence,” she added.
    I glanced again at the last three sentences of text.
     
    All ten of my charges have failed the scalpel and the fire drill. Their tumors continue to grow. The crabs continue to devour them.
     
    “What is the fire drill ?” I asked.
    “That was essentially a cauterizer. They basically treated the tumors by burning them off. Each of these patients had endured it, as well as the procedure that today we would call ‘surgical resection’ or ‘de-bulking.’ Yet the tumors recurred. These points are strongly indicative of an aggressive malignancy.”
    “I agree,” I said.
    Alyssa printed another document and handed it to me. “The handwriting, ink, and text indicate to me that this piece and the one you just read are two parts of the same document. We do not know yet what comes between that piece and this one. It is possible that the missing fragment