Anatomy of a human

Bill Bryson’s tale for every body

It’s unlikely I will ever be the subject of a booklength biography. So here’s the next best thing: a likely bestseller all about me. Of course it’s also all about you, which takes a little of the shine off it.

On the other hand, you and I would never have a biographer who writes in such loving detail about every facet of our physique: from skull to toenails; dawn halitosis to midnight insomnia; conception to cremation.

Bill Bryson isn’t a medic, biologist or psychiatrist, but that’s what makes his exploration of the human body, all seven billion billion billion atoms of it (the book is rich in jaw-dropping stats), so readable and useful. As with his earlier A Short

History of Nearly Everything, which offers a nonspecialist introduction to science, he asks all the questions a layperson doesn’t dare to ask for fear of exposing humiliating ignorance, then answers them in witty, jargon-free prose that glides you through 400 pages.

It’s fun to read because it’s not just comprehensive, but quirky. Bryson starts with a calculation of how much it would cost to assemble the 59 chemical elements of the human body in sufficient quantities to construct a Benedict Cumberbatch (£96,546.79, not including labour and VAT, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry. That’s just shy of NZ$187,000) and ends with a contemplation of old age and death that is horribly depressing (most drug companies have given up researching new drugs to counter Alzheimer’s, having hit a 99.6 per cent failure rate), and stupendously optimistic (two apparently serious American scientists claim that ‘‘some people alive right now will live to be 1000’’).

He looks at skin, which we shed at the rate of 25,000 flakes a minute, meaning that when you dust your living room you are mostly wafting around your own dead cells. And he points out that it derives its colour from a translucent sliver of epidermis no more than a millimetre thick. How many millions of people, he wonders, ‘‘have been enslaved or hated or lynched or deprived of fundamental rights’’ because of that millimetre?

He moves on to our vital working parts, such as the lungs (more capacious than you would guess – the world record for holding your breath underwater stands at 24 minutes and 3 seconds), and the heart, which will beat about 3.5 billion times during your lifetime. Or at least it will if you don’t die from heart disease which, Bryson notes, is 70 per cent more likely to kill you today than if you had lived in 1900.

Partly that’s because we have eliminated many of the things that killed people in earlier centuries, although traditionalists will be relieved to learn that the bubonic plague still claims a couple of victims each year. However, it’s also because, as Bryson wryly puts it, ‘‘100 years ago people didn’t spend five or six hours an evening in front of the TV with a big spoon and a tub of icecream’’.

He reminds us the simplest and most effective research done on cutting the risk of heart disease was a project on London’s double-decker buses in the 1940s. About 35,000 drivers and conductors were monitored for two years. The drivers were found to be twice as likely to have heart attacks as the conductors. Of course, they were. They were sitting down all day, whereas the conductors were constantly nipping up and down the stairs.

Bryson thrives on recounting such research, but he’s even more fascinated by the seemingly inexplicable idiosyncrasies of our bodies, whether trivial (‘‘it is not easy to think of a way that armpit hair enriches human existence’’), or desperately serious (why are women twice as likely as men to get multiple sclerosis). Or just bizarre, as in the question of why, about 20 years ago, a Massachusetts woman developed such an itchy forehead that one night, in her sleep, she scratched through her skull into her brain. She’s still alive, by the way.

As he delves into medical history, heroes and villains emerge. Foremost among the former are those intrepid pioneers who used their own bodies to further their scientific investigations. Men such as the Victorian surgeon Joseph Green, whose last word was ‘‘stopped’’, as he took his own pulse.

Or John Gibbon, whose pioneering 1930s experiments on himself paved the way to openheart surgery. ‘‘Gibbon stuck a thermometer up his rectum, swallowed a stomach tube and then had icy water poured down it to determine its effect on his internal body temperature,’’ Bryson writes admiringly. ‘‘After 20 years of refinements, and much heroic swallowing of iced water, he unveiled the world’s first heart-lung machine.’’

His villains range from the lobotomists, still inserting ice picks through the eye sockets of their poor victims to mess with their brains as late as the 1950s, to the craniometrists intent on proving that dark-skinned people were less intelligent because they had differently shaped heads.

Then there’s the Japanese doctor, Shiro Ishii, who ran ghastly experiments on an estimated 250,000 prisoners during World War II.

One involved tying Chinese prisoners to stakes at various distances from a shrapnel bomb, then seeing how long the victims took to die from their injuries. Because he shared this vital knowledge with the Americans after the war, he was granted immunity from prosecution.

Bryson isn’t quite so critical of the pharmaceutical corporations bribing doctors to prescribe unnecessary medications, but it’s close. Pointing to the US$3 billion fine (NZ$4.76b) imposed on GlaxoSmithKline ‘‘for a raft of transgressions’’, Bryson quotes the American academic Marcia Angell’s observation: ‘‘These kinds of fines are just the cost of doing business.’’

In some respects his view of our physicality is a little old-fashioned. He is awestruck by the speed and capacity of the human brain, yet ignores the feeling among many scientists that within a couple of decades, artificial intelligence will leave us floundering.

On sex and gender, he never mentions transgender and non-binary people. Yet one of the hottest psychological issues of our era is why, in increasing numbers of people, there is a lifedisrupting disconnection between the genitalia they were born with and the gender they want to be.

And I wish he hadn’t given space to a British doctor comparing the effectiveness of various methods of committing suicide. That surely contravenes all the sane advice given to the media.

Still, I will forgive Bryson nearly anything for debunking the widely believed myth that ‘‘men think about sex every seven seconds’’. Bryson suggests that ‘‘genuine studies’’ of this vital matter put the figure at about 19 times a day – roughly the same frequency, he claims, as men think about food. I’d say it was more a question of how hungry you feel at any given moment. About food, too. The Body: A Guide for Occupants, by Bill Bryson is out now, rrp $55.

Bryson thrives on recounting such research, but he’s even more fascinated by the seemingly inexplicable idiosyncrasies of our bodies, whether trivial, desperately serious, or just bizarre.