the body a guide for occupants by bill bryson

Indeed, the petri dishes on which the penicillium grew had been discovered only 50 years before. Bryson also reminds us that 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 pathbreaking work on lysozymes to fight infection. A good chunk of the book is devoted to 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. Bryson tells us about many unsung heroes, such as Ignaz Semmelweis, who first promoted handwashing to prevent infections in maternity hospitals, 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. Us ? (Not much - a very large chunk of the cells floating around in us belong to microbes).īryson doesn’t only talk about the science of the body - he also delves into the history of some of the greatest medical discoveries of our time.

Why does the digestive system do such a good job of killing bacteria but not our own organs? What really lies behind race and skin colour (a “sliver of skin about a millimetre thick,” says Bryson)? How much of us is really But we only need to look a little bit closer to see just how complex they are, and Bryson’s book does just that. It’s only too easy to take our bodily functions - the skin, the digestive system, the immune system and all the rest of them - for granted, just as we have come to be used to vaccines and antibiotics and modern dentistry.

The book contains a staggering amount of information, but that never stops Bryson from being chatty, down to earth and very, very funny.Īnd so we travel with Bryson, as he uncovers the many mysteries of the human body and modern medicine.

In just over 450 pages, 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. The Body, he does the same for the bodies that we, well, occupy all day. A Short History of Nearly Everything, delved into the universe, and brought the somewhat inaccessible world of science to the layperson.

The body a guide for occupants by bill bryson