Coping with cancer - terror is replaced by hope

In a century riven by two world wars and famines causing millions of deaths, disease exacted a spectacular toll on humanity even when compared to war or hunger.

The Spanish flu outbreak of 1918 is regarded as the greatest epidemic to hit humanity. At least 20m people died, some estimates double that figure. The higher estimate eclipses the 37m people who died in the Great War. It easily outstrips the toll from the century’s greatest famine, the catastrophe provoked in China by Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward which was responsible for around 30m deaths between 1958 and 1962.

During that century, humanity’s great leap forward devised strategies, usually vaccines, that greatly reduced, if not eradicated, the impact of diseases that once meant almost certain death — chicken pox, smallpox, diphtheria, malaria, polio and typhoid fever, and others. Unfortunately, we have been, and continue to be, less successful in eradicating death by hunger.