Bill Bryson takes a speedy yet comprehensive tour through the human body, and reveals it as miraculous, complex, a bit gross and more mysterious than you’d think.
It’s been a while since I last read Bill Bryson and this book definitely rekindled my love and appreciation for his ever-curious mind and wry, companionable writing style. The Body is pretty much what it says on the cover. In the space of over four hundred pages, it covers more or less every aspect of the human body – brain, skin, heart, nervous system, guts, skeleton, trillions of friendly and not-so-friendly bacteria that share our body with us – and follows the human life cycle from conception to death and what happens to your body after.
The book is so densely packed with information and fascinating facts it’s hard to know which ones to highlight in this review. The DNA in your body would stretch all the way to Pluto and beyond if it was laid out end to end. The longest-lived person known to us was a French woman who was fond of smoking and chocolate and died at the unfathomable age of 122 years and 164 days. An extreme and very rare form of insomnia, called a fatal familial insomnia, causes death as sufferers simply lose the ability to fall asleep. It’s a kind of read that might lead you to bore your friends and relatives with bits of random trivia.
What stood out to me the most was just how much about the human body is still not known or fully understood. If you played a drinking game and took a shot every time there was a variation on ‘we still don’t know why this exists or how it works’, you’d get plastered really fast. As it turns out, we don’t really know why we yawn, why we evolved to have eyebrows, why we tend to get more colds in winter, what is the purpose of appendix or that funny wobbly piece of tissue hanging in the back of your throat (it is called uvula, I learned).
Bryson’s book also doubles as a history of medical science, with each chapter devoted not just to our current knowledge but also to how we reached our contemporary understanding of the human body and things that ail us. It touches on forgotten heroes, the often arduous journeys of scientific discovery that included some hair-raising experiments, and horrific blunders medical science has committed along the way. It boggles the mind to read now that simple things like washing your hands before treating patients were initially dismissed and took decades to become the norm.
By the end of it, I was even more glad to live in the modern times, after medical science really got going in the last couple of centuries and life expectancy improved as much as in the previous 8,000 years combined. It was enough to read the vivid account of mastectomy performed without the anesthetics in 1812, probably the most nauseating passage in the entire book for me. As a woman, I feel even more fortunate; even setting aside the risks of pregnancy and childbirth, a proper medical examination of women simply wasn’t a thing until recently.
Bryson however stresses that nothing in medicine is simple and that modern healthcare is not perfect, pointing out problems of overtreatment, ineffective practices and unethical behaviour by the pharmaceutical companies. Also, while it’s tempting to feel superior and contemptuous of the misguided practices like bloodletting and lobotomies, at some point in the future a popular science book about the 21st century medicine will very likely evoke similar they did what! responses as our scientific knowledge evolves.
The Body is less humorous than some of Bryson’s books I read in the past, and while I can appreciate his efforts to flesh out the individual researchers and medical professionals these personal anecdotes still mostly felt like unnecessary detours. Overall though, as far as non-fiction goes this was an excellent and insightful read.
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