The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson
Doubleday, 2019
First let me tell you about the woman who loaned me the book, R. Shortly after stepping back from full-time ongoing work, I showed up at the knitting group at the local library. The group meets at 12:30 two Thursdays a month, so a person with a full-time, ongoing day job can’t go.
R: Welcome! Did you just move here?
Me: I just retired, so now I get to come to things during the day
R: What did you retire from
Me: Chemistry, product development, R&D
R: That’s what I did!
R is about twenty years older than me, so a pioneer, and her PhD is from MIT whereas mine is from Caltech. In the context of ladies who meet at knitting groups, we are exactly the same. We marvel still at the odds of meeting “another one of us” out in the wild.
So when R offered to loan me a book, I didn’t want to say no. I wanted to accept the overture.
Bryson’s The Body: A Guide for Occupants is a straightforward piece of non-fiction, easy to read. Bryson is reliably good company. The book is organized by system – brain, nervous system, heart, digestive system, etc. Nothing startling, and a good dose of history, which is always welcome here. Bryson tells the tales of how we know what we know and is matter of fact about what we still don’t know and can’t cure.
There are a few things – some numbers that don’t really make sense (R did the math and said it’s not right) and places where you think, for example, “I wonder if he meant to compare with all animals or just among primates?”
The book is about the human body, and it did create a queasiness in me occasionally, especially the early research on living things. I actively decided not to study biology or medicine because my 18-year-old self thought it was gross, and I haven’t changed that much. I don’t think it was more graphic than necessary, Bryson was not going out of his way to revel in the gory details, I think, but a certain amount of stuff about the body is required to write a book about the body. If you are squeamish, maybe skim those pages.
Particularly nice, he brings forward a few forgotten scientists. For example, Henry Vandyke Carter, the doctor who illustrated Gray’s Anatomy for a paltry sum. Carter’s contribution was suppressed (details in The Body) and he received neither recognition nor fortune from his work. Henry Gray received both, but as Bryson tells us, died young.
Another appalling example is Albert Shatz, the discoverer of streptomycin which was the first antibiotic for gram-negative bacteria. He discovered it as a soil biology student, and his supervisor Selman Waksman actively pushed Shatz aside and garnered all the kudos, and cash, that came from the discovery. Again, the sorry story is told in full in The Body.
The trademark Bryson humor has mellowed. It’s not the laugh-out-loud funny A Walk in the Woods is, but it’s still there. For example, Bryson was interviewing a doctor in the dissecting room of a medical school.
doctor: Killing yourself is actually difficult. We are designed not to die.
Bryson (aside): This seems slightly ironic thing to say in a big room full of dead bodies, but I take his point.
If you are in the mood for a reliably good companion and some easy non-fiction, this is a good choice. It’s about us, which is interesting to us. My copy was loaned by a friend, but Bryson is widely distributed. It is also available as an audiobook, read by the author.