BILL BRYSON

The Body: A Guide for Occupants ; by Bill Bryson ; Published by Penguin Random House ; Pages 454 ;Price Rs 999/-

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Bill Bryson is a fantastic writer who is an authority on several subjects. He is famous for his books on English language and William Shakespeare. He is highly acclaimed for his book “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, which dealt with the mysteries of the universe. It won the Aventis Prize and the Descartes Prize.All books are studded with delightful facts. Bryson was Chancellor of Durham University for 7 years .He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society.

The book under review,The Body, is all about what each one of us occupies every single day. Bryson covers a wide array of topics, from the human brain, to the skin, to the microbes that we all carry around and even cancer, or when things go horribly wrong. Bryson absorbs reams of facts, the most interesting of which he presents liberally sprinkled with mischief, wit and lateral thinking. The book contains a startling amount of data relayed in a very chatty form and bubbles with humour. One simple example—Castration is a sure cure for baldness!.

Bryson uncovers the mystifying aspects of the human body and the developments in the medical world today. The skin, the digestive system, the immune system and so many other constituents are normally taken for granted. This is akin to the manner in which we have become accustomed to vaccines and antibiotics and modern dentistry. But to discover how complex they are, one has only to dip in Bryson’s book. He captures the essence of the human body and the history of medicine and modern clinical practice in a single volume and does it admirably well. He fleshes out the lives of pioneers — often with gossip about their irascibility, tax-dodging or the hijacking of their discoveries by colleagues — following this by interviewing an expert practising in the same field today.

How does the digestive system do such a classic job of destroying bacteria but protects our own organs?, What actually is behind race and skin colour ? How much of us is really us?

Bryson deals with the history of some of the greatest medical discoveries of our time. He enshrines the achievements of several unsung heroes, such as Ignaz Semmelweis, who first promoted handwashing to prevent infections in maternity hospitals, (important to recall him in the time of Corona) ;Nettie Stevens, whose dogged persistence led to the discovery of the X and Y-chromosomes, and Theodor Bilharz, who died trying to contain typhus in Cairo. We learn of the extraordinary story of William Halsted, the father of modern surgery, who performed a daring gallbladder surgery on the kitchen table before developing the radical mastectomy for breast cancer. The great “accidental” discoveries of medicine may not have been quite as accidental as we think — Alexander Fleming was a persistent and careful scientist, whose discovery of penicillin accompanied some other path breaking work on lysozymes to fight infection. Indeed, the petri dishes on which the penicillium grew had been discovered only 50 years before. To get as far as we have — a world with vaccines against infectious diseases, treatments for cancer and higher life expectancies than ever before — we have depended on years of work by many, many great scientists before us.

Bryson manages to convey a sense of wonder in whatever he writes . The book is peppered with delightful little factoids, such as how passionate kissing can transfer more than one billion bacteria between people. Bryson’s explosive sense of humour is always present — he describes sperm cells as “blundering idiots,” “curiously ill-prepared for the one task evolution has given them.”

Bryson sharply reminds us that our bodies, designed to keep us from starving in paleolithic winters, cannot quite deal with the abundance of food in our modern lives. Medical care in the United States, advanced as it is, is expensive and inaccessible to many. With the overuse of antibiotics, we may find ourselves gravely unprepared for drug-resistant infections lurking in every scratch of a rose bush. Bryson reminds us, this is a planet of microbes, which would do just fine without us. We would do well to remember the journey we took to get this far.

Who knew, for example, that the length of our blood vessels laid end to end would take one 2.5 times around the Earth? All the DNA in the human body laid in one fine strand would really stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.

His similes are lively — ‘When you eat, the tongue darts about like a nervous host at a cocktail party’

The key to making facts memorable is to illustrate them with colourful examples. This Bryson does with great panache.

Walton was the Father of open heart surgery and enjoyed a great deal of acclaim and financial success. Unfortunately he wasn't quite as impeccable in his private affairs as he might have been. In 1973 he was convicted of five counts of tax evasion and a great deal of imaginative book-keeping. Among much else, he had claimed a $100 payment to a prostitute as a deduction tax.

Occasionally he is heartless in his comments. Two doctors who pioneered operations or techniques — Christiaan Barnard, of the first successful heart transplant, and Henry Heimlich, of the anti-choking manoeuvre — are pronounced frauds and quacks for pushing ineffective commercial treatments. Possibly they were genuinely mistaken.

The Body is broken down into sections of surprise. Each chapter focuses on a different body part, organ, or system. The chapter is detailed, often telling us how that part works, a brief history of some of the scientific discoveries made about that part, and interesting facts about that part.

If you like learning more about how this miraculous body of ours works, this is a great book to read. You learn many interesting things from Bryson.

A great work worth reading again and again to “Know Thyself”

P.P.Ramachandran.

5/4/2020.