Book Review: The Body: A Guide for Occupants

Our bodies are an extraordinary vessel for keeping us alive — describing it as “machinery” doesn’t even begin to do it justice — and also a mysterious, microbial playground that will inexplicably kill us, even when dying is the ultimate thing it doesn’t want to do. Bill Bryson, the American-British journalist and author, offers a delightful tour-de-force on the body in his aptly titled 2019 book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants.

First off, I have to say, what made the audiobook, which was read by Bryson, so enjoyable is that Bryson’s British accent made hearing the horrors of the body oddly not so horrific. But I digress. Bryson’s book is so accessible for those who aren’t into anatomy, biology, chemistry, and all the rest, because of his wit, his way of explaining for people like me, and because The Body isn’t merely a book about … the body. The Body is also a book about medical science and the scientists, both the ones we should admire and build statues to, and those we should shun from any sort of approbation, who have made remarkable discoveries and in so doing, propelled civilization forward. And the book is also about the messiness of such discoveries, both the complicated people behind them, and the way in which such discoveries are received by the medical establishment of the time. Like with other advances in human understanding, medical science is ripe with the unethical, the abhorrent, and the grotesque. But also like with other advances in human understanding, medical science is also replete with the beautiful, the daring, and the marvelous wonder that comes with pushing boundaries. The book also dives into and presents an interesting juxtaposition between the West and the East, and how often what is discovered in the East is maligned in the West, like MSG (a flavor enhancer), for example.

Given how mysterious so much of the body still remains, I came away from Bryson’s book wondering if the body — the very components of what makes us us — is an unremarked upon frontier for humankind to conquer. At a time (which is to say over the last 75 years) when we look to the stars and wonder what’s next on the celestial horizon, there is much left to learn when we look inward.

Bryson starts the book with a broad view of those components that make us us: oxygen, hydron, carbon, nitrogen, etc. These are elements found in abundance throughout the universe. In a poetic framing, Bryson says, “The only thing special about the material that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.” What a miracle it is when you really consider it. Somehow these elements come together to form the sort of brain that can write a book … about the brain, and be understood by another brain. Or write symphonies. Or fly airplanes. It’s extraordinary, really. In a lot of ways, even though it would seem like the brain is the center of control in the body, the body operates akin to the spontaneous order concept in economics. There is no one czar of the mechanisms of the body; it just sort of spontaneously comes together to all work for our benefit, i.e., to keep us alive and functioning. The brain is a beautiful mechanism, though, because it creates all of this. All of this reality we see is the reality created by the brain. All the beauty we experience, whether the taste of a chocolate chip cookie or the feel of a lover’s caress, is due to the brain. Thank you, brain! Which, it’s funny by the way, as Bryson notes, that the heart, for whatever reason, gets all the credit for our love and emotions when that’s all the brain. “I love you with all of my brain” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue the same way.

So, yes, we’re composed of the basic elements of the universe, but Bryson also makes it clear that we’re simply teeming with untold numbers of microbes. He says, “Make no mistake, this is a planet of microbes and we are here at their pleasure. They don’t need us at all. We’d be dead in a day without them.” What a humbling, and somewhat unnerving thought! I find it particularly humbling since Bryson says we don’t know much about them since you can’t grow a microbe in a lab, making them difficult to study.

The earth is also teeming with viruses, including in our own lungs and within seawater. In other words, while Earth is “hospitable” to us and other animals, there is a whole lot on the earth that can, has, and will kill us. But also, our body is a great defense mechanism at times, too. Indeed, while we go about our lives, our body is essentially in a trench war with viruses. For much of human history, we were on the losing side of this trench war — unable to assist and augment our body’s natural defenses. Infectious diseases wiped out millions of human beings. It wasn’t until the 20th century, a relative blip on the timeline of human existence, that we started fighting back in earnest and making great strides against infectious diseases. So much so, with the advent of vaccines and antibiotics (along with germ theory, better sanitation, and so on), that in modern time, in the developed world, what kills us tends to be lifestyle choices and/or genetics more so than external dangers, like infectious diseases. That means we’re dying of heart disease and accidents because accidents could move up the list once infectious diseases moved down it. Of course, that has created a new “war” of sorts between antibiotics and the bacteria resisting our antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance is one of the more horrifying, under-discussed (in mainstream circles) issues on the horizon for civilization.

Bryson begins to take the body in parts (heh) to spend a little bit of time on the mysteries therein. For example, we still don’t know exactly why we do the most important two items human beings do (other than exist in the first place): think and make memories. We can at least say that memory-making isn’t what was long envisioned where it was as if all of our memories where kept in a filing cabinet within the brain to be tapped into whenever it was needed. Memory is far more arbitrary, seemingly, where, in Bryson’s example, he can remember the starting lineup of a baseball team from the 1960s, but not someone’s name he just heard a few minutes ago. Memory is fickle and weird. Speaking of weird, I thought it was fascinating how much we don’t know about the nose because it isn’t studied as much despite how vital it is to keeping out external toxins and aiding us greatly in the experience of taste. To be fair, I get why the eyes and ears would be studied more (even the tongue) because how many people are afflicted with seeing and hearing issues. But even weirder is that there are taste receptors in the heart, lungs, and testicles for reasons we don’t quite understand. When I Google some of these mysterious items, like why do we have taste receptors in the testicles, Google does “give an answer,” as it were, but I wonder if Bryson is referring to “scientific consensus” or universal consensus when he says throughout the book that we don’t understand this or that process.

Bryson’s book, in addition to making me admire the few people who devoted (and are still devoting) their lives to fighting infectious diseases and other maladies on our behalf often against great peril to themselves, also reaffirmed how awestruck I am that organ and tissue transplantation ever occurs. (I work in the field as a communications associate.) Transplanting organs is also a relatively nascent field, and Bryson spends time on it throughout the book. That we can take an incredible organ like the heart, which will continue working for us and beating away for decades, and give it to someone else and make it work for years thereafter is astonishing. Same with the other organs and tissue, like the very thin but vital cornea. What’s so interesting is that the liver can grow back, but these other organs can’t. This is another one of those areas Bryson says we don’t quite know how the liver can do that. Or why the heck we have an appendix, while I’m on the subject of mysteries. But the biggest takeaway for folks should be that most people who have liver disease have the non-alcoholic variety, and even then, it isn’t necessarily the people you would suspect — those with obesity and unfit lifestyles — as even healthy, fit people can get non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. In fact, some people will get the early stages of it, but it won’t worsen to kill you — also a mystery. Speaking of the liver, though, while rightly trumpeting the “breath-taking advances” in organ transplantation, Bryson neglected to mention that living liver donation is possible! And again, if you donate your liver as a liver donor, your liver will grow back. Finally, one more note on Bryson’s coverage of transplantation: we do not harvest organs! We recover the gifts of donation for transplantation.

• Other mysteries Bryson covered included:
• Itching! Bryson’s coverage of itching included a haunting image that will linger with me. A woman who had a bout of shingles inexplicably had an itch above her eyebrow. It wouldn’t go away. She scratched at it while she slept, so much so that she went through the skull bone causing cerebral fluid to lead down her face. Agh! Itching also has the component of yawning mentioned below where even hearing about itching makes you want to itch.
• Much of the immune system remains a mystery since apparently everyone’s immune system is unique, making it difficult to generalize treatments.
• We don’t really understand what causes asthma or why it has increased. Even a seeming obvious correlative between the rise in pollution and asthma doesn’t necessarily map on neatly.
• We spend a third of our lives sleeping and we don’t quite know why. If someone died from sleep deprivation, we can’t pinpoint exactly what killed them.
• Babies in the womb yawn. People in a comatose state yawn. Yawning is also “infectious,” where as I’m typing this, I want to yawn, and likely, as you’re reading it, you do, too! We don’t know have answers to any of it.
• Hiccuping! Yes, there are all kinds of “home remedies” to eliminating hiccuping, but there is no scientific basis for ridding ourselves of them or why they start, and sometimes persist, in the first place.
• Migraines. I also think migraines are stigmatized to where a lot of people dismiss the idea of someone being debilitated by them.

It’s also interesting how many myths there are about the body, including that we only use 10 percent of our brain, or large swaths of nutrition (8 cups of water per day has no scientific basis, as one example), and not surprisingly, sex, especially anything to do with women, is poorly studied and surveyed (men do not think about sex every seven seconds; think about that for a second and you’ll realize how absurd that myth always was).

One of the unfortunate side effects, if you will, of our ability to have eradicated smallpox, fight off other infectious diseases, implement better sanitation, and so forth that’s led to living longer is that living longer also means we’re more likely to die of cancer now. Bryson points out that more than a century ago, nobody was much concerned with dying of cancer in America. Within 50 years, it was more common and in fact, doctors didn’t want to tell their patients they would die of cancer. Today, cancer is among the leading causes of death behind only heart disease. Because of medical intervention, like chemotherapy, Bryson says we are living longer and dying longer. Living longer also means the medical, economic, and societal issue of needing to take care of the elderly for much longer than previous generations. This issue largely remains unaddressed (at least in America).

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Bryson’s book came out a year before the COVID-19 pandemic. Ominously, Bryson talks about the Spanish Flu of 1918 that killed 50 million people worldwide, and notes that it’s not that our defenses against a repeat of such an outbreak have gotten better, only that we’ve been lucky. For what it’s worth, two years after the pandemic in 2022, in that aforementioned list of leading causes of deaths in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID-19 is number four accounting for 186,552 deaths. Staggering.

As an occupant of a body, I found Bryson’s book immensely compelling and fascinating. I’m so appreciative of the men and women throughout history who stood athwart the tide of infectious diseases — and the maladies our bodies inflict upon ourselves — and fought back, or who made momentous discoveries otherwise. Even the ones who are studying the nose deserve our approbation, dammit! I’m also, again, awestruck by the wonder that is the organ and tissue donation and transplantation field. Thank you to those men and women who dared to dare for a better future. And again, thank you to my brain for allowing me to soak up the fruits of Bryson’s brain’s labors, as he traversed the world and talked to experts of the body about the body.

As they say, we’re just passing through this life, literal occupants of a microbial playground, but what a ride it is, huh?