Page 14 - Boca ViewPointe - February '20
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Page 14, Viewpointe                                                 February 2020
      Book Review



      What a Piece of Work is a                                                                            dreaming  not  the  Freudian  id  activity,  but  more  like
      Man, or What your Primary                                                                            nightly surfing television channels. And yes, while our
                                                                                                           liver can regenerate itself, the zebra fish can regenerate
      Care Physician Doesn’t Tell                                                                          its own heart. The bacteria industry working undercover
                                                                                                           inextricably necessary for human functioning; and viruses,
      You.                                                                                                 “bad news wrapped in a protein,” that threaten our lives,
                                                                                                           but  paradoxically  the  agent  involved  with  influencing
      Bill Bryson. The Body, A Guide for Occupants. New York:                                              evolution and thereby the survival of our species.
      Doubleday, 2019.                                                                                        The discoveries that are occurring in the recent past
      Violet Moller, The Map of Knowledge, A Thousand-Year                                                 have been transformative. Understanding the role of
      History of How Classical Ideas were Lost and Found. New                                              hormones,  getting  vivid  images  of  the  brain  at  work,
      York: Doubleday, 2019.                                                                               understanding the auto-immune system and the hope for
      “how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty...                                                     advancement in medical science in curing genetic and
      in action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like                                              other infectious diseases. Angioplasty, dental implants,
      a God!                                             mind-boggling data driven text. His The Body has secured   cataract and heart by-pass surgery, all of which I personally
      the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.”   a place on the Best Seller list; as we are fascinated by the   can acclaim and attest to. Of particular interest is the
      Shakespeare                                        revelations co-equal with more than a few meetings with   notation of the mistakes in the past, stubborn adherence to
                                                         our primary care physicians.                      the Hippocratic Theory of Humours and obsessive clinging
      By Dr. Ronald J. Meyers                               Here a brilliant summary of the current understanding of   to bloodletting curative despite long empirical evidence
                                                         the functioning of the machine, our human body. A living   to the contrary. Of reproduction, in Bryson’s telling, the
         Bill Bryson is an                               organism that contains seven billion billion billion atoms;   Y  chromosome,  accounting  for  the  strictly  fortuitous
      autodidact, born and raised                        we comprise a universe of 37.2 trillion cells working, as   recombination that brings the male into existence, “runty,”
      in Des Moines, married and                         we are blithely unaware, “in perfect concert all the time.”   unstable (indolent!), and in fact actually deteriorating, so
      settled  in  Great  Britain,                       The heart decidedly not the seat of emotion but rather an   far tolerated by the more stable X which when recombined
      enjoying dual citizenship,                         organ weighing less than a pound that pumps 1680 gallons   with another X produces females. Forget the law of
      more importantly a genius                          of blood a day through the body, each circuit occurring   averages,  “interestingly,  sex  isn’t  actually  necessary,”
      self taught in everything.                         over the course 50 seconds. The length of your blood cells   evolution might lead to females self-reproducing clones
      There have been few                                unfolded would stretch twice and a half around the earth.   as the ubiquitous female Gecko has shown, “doing away
      of  like,  firstly  of  course                     With each breath, we exhale 25 sextillion molecules of   with males altogether.”
      Aristotle who formulated                           oxygen. We consume sixty tons of food over a lifetime      And  finally  ageing  and  ultimate  completion  of  the
      and contained the knowledge of the ancient world; and   and take over two hundred million strides. This is a book   cycle in death, as our cells deteriorate, victims of our
      Francis  Bacon  famously  declaring  “I  have  taken  all   to which you can always come back to like Cliff notes.  betraying  auto-immune  system  which  has  guided  our
      knowledge to be my province.” The Renaissance geniuses      There are  profuse  anecdotes  and stories. Leonardo   survival up until that point. We clearly are living longer
      Leonardo  and  Shakespeare  had  the  same  monstrous   undertaking dissection of the human skeleton in order to   and healthier, yet come to rest just like our first beloved
      inquisitive curiosity, Leonardo in his scientific studies   depict its inner workings. Several decades later the English   rusting, jalopy car, insulated at the end by fond memories
      rendered in his sketches, and Shakespeare’s humanistic   Physician Dr. William Harvey created a pretty accurate   and the comforting presence of friends and family.
      knowledge  in  his  poetry  and  plays.  Bryson  is  author   map of the circulation of blood. The rage for craniometry      Bryson’s map of medical knowledge of our time offers
      of  some  dozen  books  on  everything  from  humorous   in the nineteenth century in parsing the activities of the   an interesting contrast to Violet Moller’s map that depicts
      renditions  about  his  two  citizenships,  books  about  his   brain from its size and shape. Flight Sergeant Nicholas   the flow of knowledge during the millennium between the
      travels, including Everything (reviewed in these pages).   Alkemade jumping from a flaming airplane and falling   fall of Rome and the Italian Renaissance, what has been
      Now  he  further  has  undertaken  an  exploration  of  the   three  miles  onto  a  snowbank  and  surviving. You  will   called the Dark Ages. Moller, a young, acclaimed scholar
      human body, scoured the literature and history, travelled   learn about sweat, itch, shingles, stools, flatulence,
      the world to interview relevant figures, and produced a   yawning, stuttering, and the functioning of the five senses;   Book Review on page 16
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