Unknown Melancholies

In picking what I'd do for this macroblog I was really torn. Part of my wanted to make a crossword puzzle with all of my favorite little factoids, but the other part of me wanted to analyze my favorite passage (since I've already spent at least 75% of my nonfiction blog posts raving about Mukherjee's writing). In the end I decided to go with the crossword puzzle because what other opportunity am I going to have to make a crossword puzzle for an English project?

In a sense, this crossword puzzle is a shoutout to the first blog I ever made. Back in elementary school we got to make our own Wikispace blog for gifted. (A second shoutout for those of you who remember this project.) Mine was puzzle and riddle themed, though I already forget the name. Unfortunately I can no longer access it and find out the title because Wikispaces shut down, so this is for you, blog-who's-name-I-can't remember.

Before we get into it, two final things: 1) you'll likely be unable to solve this puzzle unless you're a trivia genius, but hopefully you'll get to learn something new! And 2) there's no blanks separating multiple-word answers.

Down:
1. Dubbed the “fairy godmother of medical research” by BusinessWeek magazine, she was a prominent health activist who rose the American Society for the Control of Cancer from the dead.
2. Word used in medieval times to describe any sort of affliction, whether it be a stroke, hemorrhage, or seizure.
3. Spurred on by the cloth-milling boom in Great Britain in the mid-1850s, ________ chemistry was a discipline focused on synthesizing products for textile dying. The chemical dyes it produced would eventually lead Paul Ehrlich to come up with the idea for chemotherapy.
4. Paul Ehrlich, the founder of chemotherapy, came up with the idea while ranting in a _____ ____ late at night to two of his fellow scientists.
8. The “most dogged, methodical, and single-minded” doctor to treat Hodgkin’s disease with X-ray radiation.
12. A journalist and advocate for breast cancer patients, who in warning against the growing disconnect between doctors and patients, sarcastically wrote, “The smiling oncologist does not know whether his patients vomit or not.”
17. William S. Halsted, the creator of radical mastectomy, battled an addiction to both ________ and morphine, yet he still managed to sustain an impressive career in surgery.
18. A word that means “beyond stillness” in Latin and that is used to describe the migration of cancer from one site to another.
19. The first of Mekherjee’s patients that the reader is introduced too. She was a kindergarten teacher and mother of three who was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
20. Leukemia, _______ is the malignant, rapid reproduction of white cells in one’s blood, "cancer in molten, liquid form."
23. Realized that postsurgical infections were caused by bacteria, so he began applying sewage cleanser (carbolic acid paste) to patients’ wounds after surgery to prevent infection. Surprisingly, it worked.
26. Civilization didn’t cause cancer, but by extending human ______ civilization unveiled it.

Because I already used Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer" last macroblog

Across:
5. A disease needs to be transformed ________ in order to be transformed scientifically. It needs advertising tools like mascots, slogans, and icons as much as it does scientific ones.
6. Stumbled upon the principle that cancer needs to be treated long after every visible sign of it disappears, though when he put it into practice it ultimately cost him his job with the NCI (National Cancer Institute).
7. What Paul Ehlrich called his cure drugs (Typan Red and Salvarsan) for their capacity to kill and for their specificity.
9. The boy behind the Jimmy Fund was not actually named Jimmy but rather _____ ________. Jimmy was just the name that Sidney Farber and Bill Koster gave him.
10. Cancer possesses different personalities and behaviors, so treatment needs to be ______ to the disease based on what stage and type of cancer it is.
11. Writer and influential Greek doctor who suggested that cancer was the result of a systemic malignant state, an internal overdose of what he called “black bile.”
13. A tight cellular seal that insulates the brain and spinal cord. It prevents foreign chemicals in the body from reaching the brain.
14. Charles Huggins discovered that the link between the “growth-sustenance” of normal and cancerous cells was much closer than previously imagined; cancer cells could be fed and _______ by our own bodies.
15. It was originally designed to be a birth control pill, but it was later used as a drug to treat estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer.
16. Pioneer of the movement to restore sanity and virtue to end-of-life care for cancer patients, she was credited with resurrecting the field of palliative (pain-relieving) medicine.
21. The first word for cancer that appeared in medical literature. It comes from the Greek word for “crab," because to Hippocrates, cancerous tumors looked like a crab dug in the sand with its legs spread in a circle.
22. Oncology—the study of tumors—took its name from the Greek word for a burden, _____, because cancer was thought to be a burden carried by the body.
24. A paleopathologist who, when performing an autopsy on the mummy of a young woman who belonged to the Chiribaya tribe, discovered a cancerous bone tumor (osteosarcoma) that was over a thousand years old.
25. A toxic gas that was used as a chemical weapon. It would later be used as a chemotherapeutic drug that rid the body of cancer.
You've officially made it to the end of the clues!


Answer Key:

The numbers are a bit small so if you can't read them, here's the full list:
1. Mary Lasker