Bill Bryson’s Latest Is A Different Kind Of Journey — Into ‘The Body’

The body

A Guide for Occupants

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Bill Bryson is beloved for his travel spell, but his newfangled record takes us not to Australia or to Europe or to Iowa, but on a travel inside our own bodies. And it ‘s called — naturally — The Body. Bryson says he ‘s truly fascinated by the ways our bodies work. “ I mean, once you start delving into the body and how it ‘s put together, and what a miracle life is when you think about it, ” he says, “ each of us is made up of 37 trillion cells, and there ‘s nothing in charge. I mean all of those cells, you precisely have chaotic bodily process going on, and little chemical signals going from one cell to another. And even somehow, all this random chaotic activity results in a wholly sentient, active, thinking human being. ”

Interview Highlights

On some of the lighter moments in his research The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia is an extraordinary humble museum, and one of the things they have there is this collection of objects that were kept by a doctor in the early twentieth century who specialized in retrieving swallow objects … sometimes from saving people ‘s lives, but frequently from people who had died because they choked on these things they swallowed. And it is the most extraordinary collection — you can look at loose drawers, glass-covered drawers and see thousands of objects that he retrieved from the gullets and the esophaguses of unfortunate people. And everything from padlocks and opera glasses and merely all kinds of things people have swallowed, either incidentally or, you know, by bizarre purpose .

On the death of George Washington from a throat infection

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He ‘d retired, you know, he ‘d won the Revolutionary War and then served two desperate terms as president, and all he truly wanted to do was just put out to Mount Vernon and have a quiet life. And he ‘d alone fair started enjoying his retirement. And he ‘d been out surveying the grove on horseback one day in winter and it was raining, and he got very wet. And when he came home, foolishly, he ate dinner in in dampen clothes. And then as a result of that, he got some kind of a throat infection — very credibly no more than precisely a bad cold. But then his doctors got hold of him, because he was a person of such eminence. Three doctors were called in, and they all came and looked into him. And what they did was they started bleeding him, which was the standard procedure for people who were ailing at that time … they drained, you know, like 40 ounces of rake from him. And then when that did n’t make him better they drained more and more … And then in the end, they drained about 40 percentage of his blood from him. And of run this had precisely the face-to-face effect of making him better, it made him much, much worse. And he died, poor man died, but basically he was killed by his doctors — and … you ca n’t say that was a everyday event in the eighteenth century. But it was pretty coarse .

On modern medical mysteries cipher ‘s always come up with a in truth plausible explanation for why we yawn. Or even an explanation for why drowsy is infectious. If you see person gape, you can about not resist the urge to yawn yourself. I think probably lots of your listeners are fighting an cheer to yawn right immediately … There is no legitimate explanation for that. And it ‘s hard to think of a direction that you could always test a guess to see what the causal agent might be. about anywhere you look in the body, you will find mystery .
We do n’t understand chronic pain. You know, if you have some pain that just goes on and on and on, it makes your life a misery. There ‘s no value in that. And so far you know this is a common occurrence for lots and lots of people. I mean, one of the greatest maladies affecting modern humans is backache. Lots and lots of people off oeuvre with chronic backache. There is no reason why you should have to suffer chronic backache, or any other kind of actually chronic pain, and so far we do. Nobody actually understands that. Almost anywhere you look in the body, you will find mystery. On whether he thinks of his own body differently now

Yes, I do ! I mean, first of all, I actually appreciate what my body does for me. And I in truth do — the fact that there are all of these systems operate, one of the facts that equitable blew me away when I stumbled upon [ it ] when I was doing the script was that we all get cancer a couple of thousand times a class on average, they think. But the matter [ is ], entirely one or two of your cells turn cancerous, and then your immune system identifies those rogue cells and immediately kills them. So it does n’t turn into anything, it does n’t become tumorous or anything. so if you get good cancer, if you get cancer in the conventional sense that you know you have to go and have it treated, you ‘ve been very in truth unlucky — but probably your consistency has tens of thousands of times deal with cancers in your torso already. I found that amazing … It is just a world of wonder. This floor was edited for radio by Emma Talkoff and Reena Advani, and adapted for the Web by Petra Mayer