Krishna
When Bill Bryson starts thinking – about anything in face, but especially about science or linguistics – he thinks on a different plane from most of us! Refer, for instance, our review of A Short History of Nearly Everything as a sample of the former topic and The Mother Tongue as a sample of the latter. Here too, he deviates from the normal path almost from the first page. The question he poses is this. We know the elements that comprise the human body (carbon etc but also selenium and some others). If you were to go to a shop to buy these in the precise quantities required (for example to make a Benedict Cumberbatch for example), how much do you have to shell out? Interestingly, the answer varies based on the reference book you consult!
Bill tells us, ever the one to spot really curious facts, that the outer layer of our epidermis (skin) is composed of dead cells. In his words “It is an arresting thought that all that makes you lovely is deceased. Where body meets air, we are all cadavers”. Indeed.
Bill Bryson goes on to the microbes that coexist with us with the same enthusiasm. He talks of the phenomenal rate of reproduction of E Coli, and the rate of amazing mutation as a by product, even though they only live a few hours. He talks about how the microbes vary from person to person and even for a single person with changing external pressures.
Next, the author goes into the various microbes in the body. Apart from bacteria and virus, we have fungi and also protists. He talks of a virus, the Bradford coccus, that had no business to be as big as a bacteria but was!
My, when he explains the magic of the brain – how colours, smell and even sound are created inside the brain instead of existing in the world, and why lather from any coloured soap is white, you get astounded anew. One of the reasons you pick up Bill Bryson’s books – especially the non travel ones – is each one is a constant source of amazement. This book does not disappoint either.
When discussing the brain and talking about what happens if parts of the brain are incapacitated (by tumour or an accident) he reveals that personality can change drastically. Some doctors took it to horrifying lengths and he discusses two particularly egregious instances. A Portuguese doctor named Egas Moniz performed lobotomy on multiple patients around 1930 – without trying the process on animals and without even worrying about the after effects. In some cases the violent tendencies went away but the patients also suffered severe personality changes. Despite the sloppy work – he had his students do the procedure but invariably claimed credit when the results were successful – he was awarded the Nobel prize.
A doctor in the US called Walter Jackson Freeman went even more enthusiastic and with just an ice pick, he inserted the unconscious patient between the eye balls and eyelid and moved it “this way and that”, severing the connections in the brain. (No, not kidding). He too operated without gloves or a mask! The icing on the cake is that Freeman was a psychiatrist with no surgical training at all.
Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of a future president, was one of his patients. She was in a care home for the rest of her life, unable to speak and fully incontinent. Her life and personality were irrevocably destroyed.
The brain is a complex and marvellous mechanism but is also prone to weird and strange disorders. Apart from epilepsy which is even now not fully understood, there is Anton-Babinski syndrome in which a person who is blind refuses to believe that they are; Riddoch syndrome where people cannot see things unless they are in morion; Capgras syndrome where a person is convinced that their closest ones are imposters; Cotard delusion where the sufferer is convinced that they are dead and cannot be disabused of that notion. ;
Phrenology and Craniometry – especially the latter – was accorded the respect due to a rigorous scientific study but has now been debunked. What is the difference? Phrenology argues that the bumps in the skull determine the character and character flaws. Craniometry is more “rigorous”. It makes several measurements and based on those ‘data points’ predicts the person’s characteristics. People with odd shaped skull (read ‘inferior races’ ) are not ‘criminal’ but ‘dangerous idiots’.
In 1866, the eminent physician John Langdon Haydon Down identified the syndrome we now know as Down’s Syndrome. But he called it Mongolim and believed that the people who suffered it were ‘Mongoloid idiots’. He assumed that the disability was ‘due to an innate regression to an inferior, Asiatic type’. He firmly believed that idiocy and ethnicity were inseparably combined and ‘Malay’ and ‘Negroid’ were regressive types of humans.
An Italian “physiologist” called Cesare Lombroso developed a theory that could predict criminal and other tendencies of humans by a few measurements – the shape of the earlobe, the slope fo the forehead and distance between toes for example.) If you had a ‘lot of space between toes, you were closer to apes’.
He then moves on to sight and states all known factors of how complex the eye is and in what small space wondrous functionality has been concentrated. He moves on to smell and says that it is way more important than people realize. Of the disorders about 5% of the world population suffers from partial or total loss of smell (hyposmia or anosmia respectively). And “a very small population suffers from cacosmia, where everything smells to them like feces!”
It is fascinating that Dr Heimlich, who invented the eponymous Heimlich maneuver that has saved many lives, was himself a shameless self promoter and given to tall boasts that made him extremely annoying. A former colleague called him ‘a liar and a thief’ and one of his own sons accused him of ‘practicing a wide-ranging, 50 year history of fraud’.
Another blunder by the same doctor was his practice of infecting patients with low doses of malaria (germs) in the belief that it would cure them of cancer, Lyme disease, and AIDS – just to name a few.
When it comes to taste, we have a few surprises there as well. The widely known ‘fact’ that different areas of the tongue have different taste buds for specific taste is a myth caused by misreading of a German paper by an English scientist.
Also, there are taste buds inside your alimentary canal (not just in the mouth) or even in your testicles, and the author says ‘no one knows what they are doing there’.
Also we learn that James Cook in one of his voyages caught a particularly fleshy fish and cooked it. Having already dined, they only took a small part of it and saved the rest for the morrow, which turned out to be very fortunate, as they all fell ill severely in the night. The fish they caught was puffer fish, a very poisonous one, albeit a delicacy in Japan only to be cooked by very skilled chefs who know how to remove most (not all) of the poison. The residual effect is to make you slightly tipsy, we learn!
Also on taste : The tastes recognized universally were salty, sweet, sour and bitter. In Japan, though, a chemist called Kikune Ikeda identified a fifth taste called ‘Umami’. Western world paid no attention to it until it was confirmed as late as 1970’s. But in Japan, Ikeda was famous, especially after he created a company called Ajinomoto to sell artifically created crystals with Umami flavour. The crystal is called Monosodium Glutamate or MSG. (Did you know that MSG is the food name and Ajinomoto was just the name of the company? I did not!)
While talking of lack of progress in medical practices, the author tells the story of George Washington – after he retired from his Presidentship – how he was mistreated by the doctors and died. Shocking.
Inevitably, as in many other books by Bill Bryson, you learn some etymology as well along the way – all related to the subject matter of course. We learn that ‘fedder’ morphed into ‘feather’, ‘fader’ morphed into ‘father’ but bladder remained stubbornly the same.
He talks about lungs and breathing, and then eating and the nutrients you need. Interesting, but all pretty tame by Bryson standards.
There is a lot more, but description of those would be like copying substantial portions of the book, which I assume many of you would want to read. However, some things do stand out. How a surgery was performed for mastectomy without the benefit of anesthetics, as they were not invented yet, and written in excruciating detail afterwards by the author Fanny Burney; an extraordinary surgeon, called William Halsted, who devised several improvements in surgical methods while being hopelessly addicted to cocaine even to function on a day to day basis (- this was kept a secret from all but the closest to him -); How when radioactive Radium was discovered, light amount of it was included in medicine (because having radium in the body was believed to be wholly beneficial) with horrifying results for some who took it regularly. A lot more to read and enjoy.
Radium was used blithely in watch dials. The watch makers employed thousands of women to hand paint them on the dials. To keep the brush thin, they rolled it between their lips!
The book ends at ‘the end’. He ends the book by talking about death.
All in all as good a read many others written by the author. There is not a whole lot to summarize, in this one, but still a pleasure to read.
7/10
— Krishna