The body is often likened to a machine, but it is so much more than that. It works 24 hours a day for decades without (for the most part) needing regular servicing or the installation of spare parts, runs on water and a few organic compounds, is soft and rather lovely, is accommodatingly mobile and pliant, reproduces itself with enthusiasm, makes jokes, feels affection, appreciates a red sunset and a cooling breeze. How many machines do you know that can do any of that? There is no question about it. You are truly a wonder.
Bill Bryson is another one of those authors that I find myself returning to time and again — because I’m interested in his topics — without actually loving his writing style. Needing an audiobook to occupy me as I tackled a large painting project, I selected The Body: A Guide for Occupants (primarily based on its fourteen hour length) and it fit the bill; filling the time and the empty air around me. In this book, Bryson gives a comprehensive overview of the human body — organ by organ, system by system — describing the contributions made by the long line of scientists who have devoted themselves to human anatomy and adding in the diseases specific to the various body parts and how we have learned to combat them. I probably would have liked this better as a physical book — Bryson narrates this himself and I found his performance a little ponderous and self-satisfied as he repeatedly slowed when approaching the punchlines of the ironic humour that rarely made me smile — but I have to admit that repeatedly Bryson shared facts that made me go, “Wow”. Plenty more wow moments than not — just a few of which I’ve shared below — I’m rounding up to four stars.
• In breathing, as in everything in life, the numbers are staggering — indeed fantastical. Every time you breathe, you exhale some 25 sextillion (that’s 2.5 × 1022) molecules of oxygen — so many that with a day’s breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived. And every person who lives from now until the sun burns out will from time to time breathe in a bit of you. At the atomic level, we are in a sense eternal.
• Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don’t need us at all. We’d be dead in a day without them.
• The great paradox of the brain is that everything you know about the world is provided to you by an organ that has itself never seen that world. The brain exists in silence and darkness, like a dungeoned prisoner. It has no pain receptors, literally no feelings. It has never felt warm sunshine or a soft breeze. To your brain, the world is just a stream of electrical pulses, like taps of Morse code. And out of this bare and neutral information it creates for you — quite literally creates — a vibrant, three-dimensional, sensually engaging universe. Your brain is you. Everything else is just plumbing and scaffolding.
• In the 2017–18 flu season, to take one recent example, people who had been vaccinated were only 36 percent less likely to get flu than those who hadn’t been vaccinated. In consequence, it was a bad year for flu in America, with a death toll estimated at eighty thousand. In the event of a really catastrophic epidemic — one that killed children or young adults in large numbers, say — Kinch believes we wouldn’t be able to produce vaccine fast enough to treat everyone, even if the vaccine was effective. “The fact is,” he says, “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 was, in particular, awaiting a passage like that last one; wondering if Bryson would have anticipated our Covid world and he does write prophetically about zoonotic diseases and the likelihood of species-jumping pandemic-causing viruses.) Bryson clears up a bunch of myths — the idea that we use only 10 percent of our brains, that we require 10000 steps or eight glasses of water/day, that MSG causes Chinese Food Syndrome, that all the chemicals that make up our bodies could be bought for pocket change, antioxidants are “a giant racket” that do not combat aging, a daily aspirin is as likely to cause gastrointestinal problems as prevent heart or stroke disease — but the most frustrating aspect of this book (which is not Bryson’s fault) is how very often he describes some aspect of the human body and is forced to add, “and no one knows why”. That we have learned so much about how our bodies work is a marvel; that so much remains mysterious is more marvelous still.
