The Body In Question

by Jonathan Miller

In this remarkable book Jonathan Miller considers the functioning of the body as a subject of private experience. He explores our attitudes towards the body, our astonishing ignorance about certain parts of it and our inability to read its signals. Taking as his starting point the experience of pain, Dr Miller explores the elaborate social process of 'falling ill', considers the physical foundations of 'dis-ease' and looks at the types of individuals man has historically attributed with the power of healing. His explanations are so lucid, so wide-ranging and so whole-heartedly entertaining it is often hard to believe one is reading about the facts of one's own body and what can go wrong with it. His use of metaphor and suggestive models, particularly when tracing the historical development of certain leading ideas in human physiology, is highly stimulating. Above all, there is the keen originality and sheer enthusiasm of Dr Miller's approach to his subject which makes The Body in Question such an outstanding book.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Medicine, History, History Of Medicine, Reference, Health

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE was a British theatre and opera director, author, television presenter, humorist and sculptor. Trained as a physician in the late 1950s, he first came to prominence in the 1960s with his role in the comedy review Beyond the Fringe with fellow writers and performers Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. Despite having seen few operas and not knowing how to read music, he began stage-directing them in the 1970s and became one of the world's leading opera directors with several classic productions to his credit. His best-known production is probably his 1982 "Mafia"-styled Rigoletto set in 1950s Little Italy, Manhattan. He was also a well-known television personality and familiar public intellectual in the UK and US.

Reviews

[Yanni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting perspective of anatomy and physiology by Miller, the renowned polymath - (originality a physician) writer, opera director and generally bloody clever chap. The fascinating take is that he talks about the body as the subject of private experience, and our attitudes towards our body. Deeply subjective and fascinating.

[Catwalker · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Body In Question recapitulates Jonathan Miller's TV series on the history of medicine, produced for the BBC. I have never seen the TV show, but I found the book captivating and broad in its approach. It does not address medicine chronologically, but instead looks at different systems individually and reveals how we came to understand what is going on there. The story begins with symptoms, followed by the question of what sorts of things were done to relieve suffering at different times in history. Miller links ideas in medicine to the culture of the time, not only scientific theories, but also religion, art, music, and drama. Physical science provided metaphors that illuminated the functions systems in the body: muscles as springs, the heart as a pump, the 'digital' nature of the genetic code, thermal regulation and other homeostatic control through negative feedback paths. Miller treats different traditions of folk medicine and even faith healing more kindly than might be expected in a treatise on Western medicine.
Medicine continues to advance, and this book does not cover the latest advances. But it shows in a thoughtful and imaginative way how medicine has progressed from an art towards a science, and what that progress was based on.