Page 14 - Boca ViewPointe - February '20
P. 14
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