The Body: A Guide for Occupants

by Bill Bryson

Something else viruses do is bide their time. A most extraordinary example of that came in 2014 when a French team found a previously unknown virus, Pithovirus sibericum, in Siberia. Although it had been locked in permafrost for thirty thousand years, when injected into an amoeba it sprang into action with the lustiness of youth.

Shingles as a medical condition comes from the Latin cingulus, meaning a kind of ‘belt’;

The common cold is not a single illness, but rather a family of symptoms generated by a multiplicity of viruses, of which the most pernicious are the rhinoviruses.

The average adult touches his face sixteen times an hour,

The most efficient method of transfer for germs, it seems, is a combination of paper money and nasal mucus.

in 1928, while Alexander Fleming was away on a holiday from his job as a medical researcher at St Mary’s Hospital in London, some spores of mould from the genus Penicillium drifted into his lab and landed on a petri dish that he had left unattended. Thanks to a sequence of chance events – that Fleming hadn’t cleaned up his petri dishes before departing on holiday, that the weather was unusually cool that summer (and thus good for spores), that Fleming remained away long enough for the slow-growing mould to act – he returned to find that the bacterial growth in the petri dish had been conspicuously inhibited.

Check out this quote.

He had a volatile temperament and slightly paranoid instincts – although it seems fair to say that if there was ever a time when a Jew might be excused paranoia it was the 1930s.

Every bit of penicillin made since that day is descended from that single random cantaloupe.34

Almost three-quarters of the forty million antibiotic prescriptions written each year in the United States are for conditions that cannot be cured with antibiotics.

most Americans consume second-hand antibiotics in their food

the death rate from infectious diseases has been climbing and is back to the level of about forty years ago.

When more than one teenager is in a car, for instance, the risk of an accident multiplies by 400 per cent.

Fifty years later, in Portugal, a professor of neurology at the University of Lisbon, Egas Moniz, decided to try again, and began experimentally cutting the frontal lobes of schizophrenics to see if that might quiet their troubled minds. It was the invention of the frontal lobotomy (though it was then often called a leucotomy, particularly in Britain).

Anton-Babinski syndrome, for instance, is a condition in which people are blind but refuse to believe it.

Phrenology was the practice of correlating bumps on a skull with mental powers and attributes of character,

Ekman concluded that six expressions are universal: fear, anger, surprise, pleasure, disgust and sorrow. The most universal expression of all is a smile, which is rather a nice thought.

We are the only creatures that cry from feeling, as far as we can tell.

You don’t normally experience the blind spot because your brain continually fills in the void for you.

Both are named for a seventeenth-century Italian anatomist, Antonio Maria Valsalva, who also, not incidentally, named the Eustachian tube, after his fellow anatomist Bartolomeo Eustachi.

The headline on the letter was ‘Chinese-Restaurant Syndrome’ and from this small beginning it became fixed in many people’s minds that MSG was a kind of toxin.

The discovery of blood types explained why transfusions often failed: because the donor and recipient had incompatible types. It was a hugely significant discovery, but unfortunately almost no one paid any attention to it at the time.

Thomas Addison (1793–1860) was one of a trio of outstanding doctors, known as ‘The Three Greats’, at Guy’s Hospital in London in the 1830s. The others were Richard Bright, discoverer of Bright’s disease (now called nephritis), and Thomas Hodgkin, who specialized in disorders of the lymphatic system and whose name is commemorated in Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas.

To test how well humans would remain in place on a cross, he nailed real human corpses to wooden crosses using different types of nail driven through different parts of the hands and wrists. He discovered that nails driven through the palm of the hand – the method traditionally depicted in paintings – would not support the weight of a body. The hands would literally tear apart.

Children do much better with extreme cold than with extreme heat. Because their sweat glands aren’t fully developed, they don’t sweat freely as adults do. That is in large part why so many of them die so swiftly when left in cars in warm weather.

In a typical experiment, Chinese prisoners were tied to stakes at staggered distances from a shrapnel bomb.24 The bomb was detonated and scientists then walked among them, carefully noting the nature and extent of the prisoners’ injuries and how long it took them to die. Other prisoners were shot with flame throwers for similar purposes, or starved, frozen or poisoned. Some, for unfathomable reasons, were dissected while still conscious.25 Most of the victims were captured Chinese soldiers, but Unit 731 also experimented on selected Allied prisoners of war to make sure that toxins and nerve agents had the same effects on Westerners as on Asians. When pregnant women or young children were needed for experiments, they were randomly snatched from the streets of Harbin.26 Nobody knows how many people died in Unit 731, but one estimate has put the number as high as 250,000.

are a kind of elite corps in the immune system,

Then it became one in 10,000, then one in 5,000. Today the proportion is one in 250 and still rising. Why this has happened no one can say.

Breathing is one of the few autonomic functions that you can control intentionally, though only up to a point.

What can be said with some confidence is that many people have a faith in health supplements that goes some way beyond the fully rational. Americans can choose from among a truly staggering 87,000 different dietary supplements, and they spend a no less impressive $40 billion a year on them.

Part of the problem is that we bombard ourselves with a lot of tainted stuff. An investigation by the American Food and Drug Administration in 2016 found that 84 per cent of chicken breasts, nearly 70 per cent of ground beef, and getting on for half of pork chops contained intestinal E. coli, which is not good news for anything but the coli.

The largest source of foodborne illness is not meat or eggs or mayonnaise, as is commonly thought, but green leafy vegetables. They account for one in five of all food illnesses.

fingerlike protrusion known as the appendix, which has no certain purpose but kills about 80,000 people around the world every year when it ruptures or grows infected.

In the United States, about 250,000 people are hospitalized with appendicitis annually and about 300 die,

Adults in the West produce about 200g of faeces a day – a little under half a pound, about 180 pounds a year, 14,000 pounds in a lifetime. Stools consist in large part of dead bacteria, undigested fibre, sloughed off intestinal cells, and the residues of dead red blood

As the eminent sleep researcher Allan Rechtschaffen observed many years ago: ‘If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, then it is the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.’

For others, paralysis doesn’t immediately abate upon awaking and the victim finds himself awake but unable to move – a deeply unnerving experience, it seems, but one that mercifully tends to last only for a few moments.

Most of us have experienced that abrupt feeling of falling while asleep known as a hypnic or myoclonic jerk.

Without daylight, clocks or other clues to the passage of time, Siffre had to guess when 24 hours had elapsed and discovered to his astonishment that when he had calculated 37 days to have passed, it was actually 58.

Whatever people do in a northern spring – like commit suicide in greater numbers – they do six months later in the southern spring.

In all the specimens he studied, one chromosome always remained aloof from the others. Henking dubbed it ‘X’ because it was mysterious, not because of its shape, as is nearly always assumed.

By mixing and matching genes we get variety, and that gives us safety and resilience. It makes it harder for diseases to sweep through whole populations. It also means that we can evolve. We can hold on to beneficial genes and discard ones that impede our collective happiness.