Let’s go on a guided tour
Bill Bryson’s book offers a treasure trove of facts and statistics on the human body
During the few moments it will take you to read this review, your body will be extremely busy. Your lungs will inhale and exhale about 300 sextillion oxygen molecules. Your bone marrow will create some 200 million red blood cells. Your eyebrows will serve as a buffet for thousands of tiny mites that, as Bill Bryson puts it, munch on our cells as if they are a “giant crusty bowl of Corn Flakes.”
One of the strengths of Bryson’s delightful new book, The Body, is that it reveals the thousands of rarely acknowledged tasks our body takes care of as we go about our day. We should be thankful.
Well, mostly thankful. In some respects, the human body is so fragile.
It’s a collection of evolution’s Scotchtape-and-bubble-gum fixes (see our injury-prone knees or the way we stub our toes or how exposed our skin is to the elements). Plus, our bodies can and do go horribly awry, whether from tennis elbow or deadly infections.
But still, this cluster of interdependent 37.2 trillion cells is also amazingly resilient and brilliantly remarkable for its efficiency and intelligence.
Test your knowledge: What is ‘horripilation’?
Bryson takes us on a body-part-by-body-part tour, with chapters devoted to the brain, the guts and the skin and hair. Each chapter weaves together history, anecdotes, expert interviews and vocabulary lessons. I learned about “horripilation” (the proper name for goose bumps) and “adermatoglyphia” (the rare condition of having no fingerprints).
The overall result is informative, entertaining and often, disconcerting.
The book really comes alive when Bryson allows medical specialists to speak about their work with geeky exuberance, as when a surgeon extols the engineering qualities of cartilage: “It is many times smoother than glass: it has a friction coefficient five times less than ice... It doesn’t crack under pressure as ice would. And you grow it yourself. It’s a living thing. None of this has been equalled in engineering or science.”
Bryson particularly excels at ferreting out unsung heroes. Here, he gives some love to John Charnley, a British orthopaedic surgeon, who perfected the artificial hip made of steel and plastic. “Almost no one has heard of Charnley,” Bryson writes, “but few people have brought relief to greater numbers of sufferers than he did.” And Bryson gives much-deserved credit to a woman named Fanny Hesse, albeit in a footnote. Hesse, who was married to a German scientist, suggested growing microbes in agar, which her grandmother used in pudding recipes. Agar turned out to be the perfect habitat for microbes. Hesse likely saved millions of lives by speeding up tuberculosis research and microbiology in general. Thank you, Frau Hesse. Bryson takes us on a bodypart-by-body-part tour, with chapters devoted to the brain, the guts and the skin and hair. Each chapter weaves together history, anecdotes, expert interviews and vocabulary lessons. The overall result is informative, entertaining and often, disconcerting.
The antibiotic crisis is real
Bryson is good at allaying fears and busting myths. He says you don’t have to worry about MSG - there’s no science indicating that eating normal amounts of this synthetic umami causes headaches or malaise. You can also stop obsessing about antioxidants. There’s little science behind the claim that you can increase your lifespan with antioxidant supplements (a $2 billion (Dh7.34 billion)-a-year industry).
If there’s one part of this book everyone should read, it’s the five pages on the antibiotic crisis. It is a feat, too, of narrative skill to bake so many
facts into an entertaining and nutritious book, as Bryson sketches the history of lobotomies, phrenology and heart transplants, or scoots through some simple evolutionary theory.
Bryson is respectably careful, too, to point out how much we still don’t know about ourselves: for instance, why allergies exist, why we have such big sinuses, why we get hiccups or yawn. One thing we do know is that a new age of pandemic infectious disease is coming because of our incontinent use of antibiotics.