The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson

Published by Doubleday on October 15, 2019

“We are the only creatures that cry from feelings, so far as we can tell. Why we do so is another of life’s many mysteries.” My takeaway from Bill Bryson’s The Body is that medical science is perplexed by the mysteries of the human body. Almost as soon as scientists believe they have discovered something true about our physical containers, the truth turns out to be false. From balancing the body’s humors with leeches to using lobotomies as a cure for headaches, the history of medical science is a history of getting it wrong. Unfortunately, modern scientists are just as apt to be mistaken, although modern doctors are a bit less likely to base deadly treatments on ignorance.

Some of the body’s mysteries are inherent in evolution. The Body makes clear that humans are not the product of intelligent design. Our bodies are largely the product of evolutionary workarounds. Yet evolution is nothing if not mysterious. Zebra fish regrow damaged heart tissue. Humans don’t. Seems like pretty poor planning for an intelligent designer.

Bryson explores the body in enough detail to cause the reader to marvel at its workings, but not in so much detail as to create a multi-volume text. He examines skin and bones, organs (the brain and heart, liver and kidneys, lungs and guts), the neurological system, and cellular biology. He points out the many ways in which the body acts as a factory, producing chemicals that scientists don’t understand or misunderstand until they develop a working theory about their importance — a theory that will probably be subject to wholesale revision a few years later.

Bryson discusses food and how we experience taste before our bodies convert it to fuel. He considers cancer and other diseases, as well as the checkered history of medicine. He examines ever-changing opinions about exercise and conflicting experiences about the need for sleep. Naturally, he takes a look at reproduction, without which there would be no more bodies, and sex, without which there would be no reproduction.

Bryson is nothing if not informative. He explains why ATP (the chemical adenosine triphosphate) is “the most important thing in your body you have never heard of.” He provides miniaturized biographies of scientists who made crucial contributions to the human understanding of the mind and body, only to be undercut in their time or overshadowed by scientists who stole their work.

Some of Bryson’s most interesting paragraphs remind us how science is always at war with profit. When a biochemist in the 1950s reported a clear connection between the high intake of trans fats and clogged arteries, his work was disparaged by lobbyists for the food processing industry. More than 50 years passed before the American Heart Association recognized that correlation and nearly 75 years went by before the FDA stood up to food producers and declared excessive consumption of trans fats to be unsafe.

Bryson reports his findings with good humor, although perhaps with less charm than some of his earlier books. He notes that sex may be biologically unnecessary, given the number of organisms that have abandoned it as a reproductive strategy. Geckos have done away with males altogether. He considers it “a slightly unsettling thought if you are a man” that “what we bring to the reproductive party is easily dispensed with.”

On a more serious note, although this is a pre-pandemic book, Bryson talks about how much risk the human race faces from the rapid spread of disease. If Ebola were a less efficient killer, Bryson notes, it would not strike such panic into communities and would make it easier for afflicted individuals to mingle, allowing it to spread farther and endanger more people. His discussion seems prescient, given the spread of Covid-19.

Bryson’s knack is for communicating a wealth of complex information in digestible morsels that readers who don’t have an M.D. or a PhD in a biological science can comprehend. He engages in storytelling, explaining how scientists stumbled across or misunderstood facts and how their mistakes became part of the medical canon until it became impossible to ignore scientific findings that contradicted them. The information in The Body is a bit overwhelming, but the book’s true value lies in reminding the reader that medical science is constantly improving its knowledge of what makes us tick, and that our current certainties are likely to be replaced by more accurate knowledge tomorrow.

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