I love you so much I’d like to eat your liver

That’s a term of endearment in Hungary — honest! A fascinating new book about the body explains why

Although we all have one, the human body is a mystery to most of us. We can feel it working, we can even see it working, to some extent. But, generally, it does what it does without any conscious input from us at all.

lungs? Spleen? gall bladder? liver? All working hard at what they do, while we sit and read the newspaper.

And when the body goes wrong, there doesn’t seem to be any sense behind that, either. When we don’t feel well, we go to the doctor, who may or may not be able to work out the problem, and may or may not be able to treat it.

Sometimes, we don’t feel well, but we’re not ill. Sometimes, we feel fine — yet we’re dying.

It’s no surprise, then, that among the vast range of people drawn to the medical profession, quite a few are contemplative, thoughtful types, absorbed by the mystery of it all.

gavin Francis has written travel books about the Arctic and the Antarctic and won awards for them, but his day job is as a gP in an Edinburgh health centre, and he is photographed for this book with a stethoscope hanging reassuringly around his neck.

his travels this time are within —and no less fascinating for that.

Adventures In human Being is a series of essays on different parts of the body, beginning at the head, ending at the toes. It’s not in any way comprehensive: each body part sets Francis off on a different intellectual journey.

We travel with him, wondering where he will take us next.

For the ‘ Face’ chapter, for instance, he begins with his days as a demonstrator of anatomy, showing his students which muscles in the face do what, thus giving a grounding to those who would one day perform Botox injections, facelifts or facial reconstructive surgery.

From there, he starts thinking about leonardo da Vinci, whose ‘drawings of the muscles of the face wouldn’t be bettered for centuries’.

leonardo perceived that there are two groups of muscles in the face: ‘those we use for chewing, which are thick, strong and moved by the fifth nerve to issue directly from the brain, and those we use for facial expression, which are subtler, weaker and moved by the seventh nerve from the brain.’ And this reminds Francis of a patient who suffered from Bell’s palsy, a paralysis of one side of the face caused by a damaged nerve.

Most people make a full recovery from Bell’s, but this patient did not. She didn’t go to work and barely left her house for months. Eventually, Francis recommended she have a Botox injection to the other side of her face, to restore some kind of symmetry. She was delighted by the effect.

A few months later, she came back to the surgery for something else. the obviousness of the palsy was back. But she had decided against having more Botox. ‘Did you get fed up of the injections?’ Francis asked her.

‘Not just that, but . . . my feelings are more real when I can show them,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go through life wearing a mask.’

Each of the 16 chapters wends its way like this, like a well-plotted short story. In ‘Ear’, he talks about the phenomenon of incapacitating, severe vertigo and the ability to cure it with no more than a series of movements and exercises.

‘heart’ becomes a meditation on the strange feelings of dissociation some patients feel after heart surgery when, for however short a time, the job of pumping their blood is taken over by a machine.

they call it ‘pump-head’. Some patients become disinhibited or violent, others withdraw into silence — all are ‘not themselves’ in some crucial way.

the liver, as you may already know, is the only major organ that can regenerate itself. But what you may not know is that ‘I’d like to eat your liver’ is a term of endearment from the eastern reaches of Iran, as far west as the plains of hungary.

In the grimms’ original and unsanitised version of Snow White, the wicked Queen orders a huntsman to kill the girl and bring back her liver to prove that he has done so.

THE huntsman can’t bear to do it, and so brings back the entrails of a pig instead. According to the grimms, the Queen inspected them, was satisfied, then ate them ‘salted and cooked’.

I don’t remember that in the Disney film.

this is a wonderful book: funny, wise, extremely informative in a quiet way and recognising no boundaries between science and art. Francis has the soul of a poet, and he sees beauty and form where most of us would not dare look.

In a chapter challengingly titled ‘large Bowel and rectum’, Francis reproduces an X-ray of coiled-up intestines that really does resemble a work of art.

then he remembers a patient who came into A&E with a ketchup bottle . . . and, well, you don’t want to know any more than that, I can assure you.

Except that, as the X-ray revealed, the lid was still on.