The Body: A Guide for Occupants

Bill Bryson has made quite the career out of funny, informative, light reading books and The Body is no exception. Each chapter covers some portion of the human body, like discussions about blood, brain, nerves, sex organs, death and cancer. Here are a few tidbits of info for your perusal:

+ If you blew [a virus] up to the size of a tennis ball, a human would be five hundred miles high. A bacterium on the same scale would be about the size of a beach ball.

+ researchers infected the metal door handle to an office building and found it took only about four hours for the “virus” to spread through the entire building, infecting over half of employees and turning up on virtually every shared device like photocopiers and coffee machines.

+ Giraffes, oddly, sometimes have gallbladders and sometimes don’t.

+ To power our forward motion, we have a distinctively gigantic muscle in our buttocks, the gluteus maximus, and an Achilles tendon, something no ape has.

+ If you are deprived of it for long enough, you will die—though what exactly it is that kills you from lack of sleep is a mystery, too.

+ The prostate, it might be said, produces seminal fluid throughout a man’s adulthood and anxiety in his later years.

+ It has been suggested, in fact, that if all men lived long enough, they would all get prostate cancer.

+ That’s why you are constantly told to eat more fiber: because it keeps your gut microbes happy and at the same time, for reasons not well understood, reduces the risk of heart disease, diabetes, bowel cancer, and indeed death of all types.

But the most amazing one to me was in the chapter on the brain. In discussing how long it takes an image to get from your eye to the brain (about a fifth of a second) :

+ To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present.

Mind blowing. It was also amazing just how little we still know about the body, especially the "Whys". My wife is probably glad I am finally finished reading the book so I will stop interrupting her reading by narrating another wild fact from the book!

My two biggest take aways from the book are that while there are indeed plenty of disagreements about what we need and don't need, the scientific community is solidly behind the need for both exercise and, believe it or not, fiber. Exercise continually showed up in the book, as it reduces the odds of everything from cancer to Alzheimer's. And while there might be some disagreement on how much of both exercise and fiber, both are essential to a healthy life. As one of fibers biggest boosters (again, much to my wife's chagrin), I felt vindicated!

So while this isn't any kind of text book, it sure is an informative and interesting read. You will learn a lot of things you just didn't know before. And he also name drops a lot of other books for more in depth study, which I have added to my Want To Read list, like [b:Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less|48984802|Clean The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less|James Hamblin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1585632554l/48984802.SY75.jpg|74399656], [b:Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex|5981308|Bonk The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex|Mary Roach|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1335719323l/5981308.SX50.jpg|2398516] and [b:Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life|2051708|Microcosm E. Coli and the New Science of Life|Carl Zimmer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435335989l/2051708.SY75.jpg|2056731]. Gotta get to reading!

 I'd put [a:Bill Bryson|7|Bill Bryson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1578597522p2/7.jpg]'s [b:A Short History of Nearly Everything|21|A Short History of Nearly Everything|Bill Bryson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1433086293l/21.SY75.jpg|2305997] at the top of the list for nonfiction books I've read in my life, a list which, I admit, is short. This latest, [b:The Body: A Guide for Occupants|43582376|The Body A Guide for Occupants|Bill Bryson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1565810646l/43582376.SX50.jpg|67805986], which came out in 2019, would be maybe third or fourth on that list. It's a great book I'd strongly recommend and the only reason I'm not giving it five stars is because of a few minor things that would bother only me, I think.
 Bryson's greatest gift is in explaining complicated things clearly yet without making you feel you're being talked down to. (It's a skill I'd love to have but lack; when I try to do that people think I'm talking to them like they're in kindergarten.) The Body can be read as sheer entertainment and passed on to a friend, but it's also worth keeping and using as a reference. It has thorough notes on sources and a comprehensive index. Bryson's other gift is his writing. It's somehow a perfect mix of literary and journalism but I wouldn't call it literary journalism, a genre best seen in the writing of [a:John McPhee|40|John McPhee|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1235861988p2/40.jpg], [a:Joan Didion|238|Joan Didion|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1335450818p2/238.jpg] and [a:Truman Capote|431149|Truman Capote|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1419249359p2/431149.jpg]. It's its own thing. As in A Short History, Bryson tells the stories of many of the people who have advanced our knowledge of the human body and medicine, people you've probably never heard of even though they've probably made your life or the life of someone close to you much better or even possible. He does this in short passages but they're fascinating.
 OK, my stupid quibbles are these, stupidest first: 1. He calls Down syndrome "Down's syndrome." Wrong, wrong, wrong. A professional writer of his level should know better. 2. He mentions just briefly that the belief that an enormous amount of your body head escapes from the head "seems" not to be true. It's a silly myth that has an interesting history that anyone can find with seconds of research. I'd have loved to hear his take on it. 3. He calls tuberculosis the most deadly infectious disease there is today, which is true but AIDS gets no mention and malaria just one sentence.
Like I said, stupid and personal.
I'm writing this in the middle of March of 2020 and even though The Body was published in 2019 what he says about diseases is current and insightful:

 A successful virus is one that doesn't kill too well and can circulate widely. That's what makes the flu such a perennial threat. A typical flue renders its victims infectious for about a day before they get symptoms and for about a week after they recover, which turns every victim into a vector. The great Spanish flue of 1918 racked up a global death toll of tens of millions—some estimates put it as high as a hundred million—not by being especially lethal but by being persistent and highly transmissible. It killed only about 2.5 percent of victims, it is thought. Ebola would be more effective—and in the long run more dangerous—if it mutated a milder version that didn't strike such panic into communities and made it easier for victims to mingle with unsuspecting others.
 That is, of course, no grounds for complacency. Ebola was only formally identified in the 1970s, and until recently all its outbreaks were isolated and short-lived, but in 2013 it spread to three countries—Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone—where it infected twenty-eight thousand people and killed eleven thousand. That's a big outbreak. On several occasions, thanks to air travel, it escaped to other countries, though fortunately in each instance it was contained. We may not always be so lucky. Hypervigilance makes it less likely diseases will spread, but it's no guarantee that they won't.
 It's remarkable that bad things don't happen more often. According to one estimate reported by Ed Yong in The Atlantic, the number of viruses in birds and mammals that have the potential to leap the species barrier and infect us may be as high as 800,000. That is a lot of potential danger.

As an occupant, I enjoyed this guide to the body. I especially liked the less useful information and the gossip. It's amazing how often reknowned medical scientists were, outside of the discoveries that made them famous (if they weren't actualy the discoveries of others who never got credit) were involved in unsavory, illegal, or otherwise crazy schemes of which most of us are unaware. It's relatively recent that doctors are actually able to help their patients. George Washington died because of how his doctors chose to treat a minor sore throat.

A few random facts I recall: The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. Hair and nails do not continue to grow after death. Near death paliative care cancer patients live longer than those who continue to get chemotherapy. Despite superior American health care, natives of Costa Rica live longer because of their healthier life styles. Most grave sites are no longer visited fifteen years after death. Vitamins were originally called "Vitamines"--short for vital amines. Blood type O was really blood type zero. People at first thought that radiation was good for you. Ones DNA unwound would extend from here past the (non) planet Pluto. All the penicillin we have today is descended from the mold on a single canteloupe. If cancer were cured today, our average lifespan would increase by less than three years. When Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, it was years before it was accepted as fact, in part because no one knew what blood was for. Chemotherapy was discovered because of the effects of chemical weapon mustard gas.