Jill S. (brainybibliophile) - reviewed on 6/9/2020 + 19 more book reviews

Reading Bryson's book, especially its latter chapter "When Things Go Wrong: Diseases" during the COVID-19 outbreak, was a window into the wonders of the human body and the limits of what we know and understand about it. The author quotes Michael Kinch of Washington University: "we are really no better prepared for a bad outbreak today than we were when Spanish flu killed tens of millions of people a hundred years ago. The reason we haven't had another experience like that isn't because we have been especially vigilant. It's because we have been lucky." I wonder how the chapter on disease would have changed had the book been published just a little later.
Bryson's book is a good starting point for exploration of the body's many intricacies beyond its diseases and limitations. But because it is a broad, and therefore limited, overview of the human body and its many systems, there were topics I expected that were merely touched on or completely overlooked, such as AIDS, menstruation, and conjoined twins, among many others. The book also constantly references evolution over millions of years as "fact" behind a variety of the body's systems.
However, The Body is Bryson's trademark mix of informational, wryly humorous, and quite readable. Presented primarily with each chapter focusing on one aspect of the body or a related topic, like "the heart and blood" or "food, glorious food," the book is full of interesting, often surprising facts and statistics. For example, the average human heart beats about 100,000 times daily. The body is constructed of seven billion billion billion atoms. The average human takes about 550 million breaths. A mother's body can detect missing antibodies in her baby and then produce them in her breast milk. The book is also populated with a horde of medical professionals (and not-so-professionals) who advanced science, often in shocking ways and/or while risking their own health and very lives. Werner Forssmann, for instance, inserted a catheter into an artery in his own arm until it reached his heart. Dr. John H. Gibbon swallowed a stomach tube and had ice water poured through it while a thermometer was inserted in his rectum; he was testing the ability of deep blood vessels to dilate and constrict. And William Harvey dissected his father and sister in attempts to learn about the body. These are just three of a multitude of tiny bios that fill Bryson's book.
Especially in the final chapters, Bryson presents, in straightforward fashion, many ethical and social concerns related to medicine to think about, such as the role of money in research decisions of pharmaceutical companies, the differences in standards of care in other countries, the limits of preventative testing, and the multitude of what we don't know.
Overall, the book made me think about the wonder of God's creation: the human body.

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