Hesse likely saved millions of lives by speeding up tuberculosis research and microbiology in general. Agar turned out to be the perfect habitat for microbes. Hesse, who was married to a German scientist, suggested growing microbes in agar, which her grandmother used in pudding recipes. “Almost no one has heard of Charnley,” Bryson writes, “but few people have brought relief to greater numbers of sufferers than he did.” And Bryson gives much-deserved credit to a woman named Fanny Hesse, albeit in a footnote.
Here, he gives some love to John Charnley, a British orthopedic surgeon, who perfected the artificial hip made of steel and plastic. The overall result is informative, entertaining and often gross (kissing, according to one study, transfers up to one billion bacteria from one mouth to another, along with 0.2 micrograms of food bits).īryson particularly excels at ferreting out unsung heroes. I learned about “horripilation” (the proper name for goose bumps) and “adermatoglyphia” (the rare condition of having no fingerprints). Each chapter weaves together history, anecdotes, expert interviews and vocabulary lessons. This time, Bryson takes us on a body-part-by-body-part tour, with chapters devoted to the brain, the guts and the skin and hair. And on the whole, it’s pretty remarkable.īryson built his career with wry first-person travel books (for instance, “A Walk in the Woods,” about his ill-fated trek on the Appalachian Trail) and has since moved onto popular guides to science and history (“ A Short History of Everything,” about, well, everything). Plus, our bodies can and do go horribly awry, whether from tennis elbow or deadly infections.īut still, this cluster of interdependent 37.2 trillion cells is all we’ve got - at least until we upload our brains into the cloud. It’s a collection of evolution’s Scotch-tape-and-bubble-gum fixes (see our injury-prone knees or the dangerously exposed scrotum). In some respects, the human body is terribly designed. One of the strengths of Bryson’s delightful new book, “The Body,” is that it reveals the thousands of rarely acknowledged tasks our body takes care of as we go about our day.
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