I
F you unzipped me and told me to reach
in and find my spleen, I wouldn’t have
a clue,’ says Bill Bryson. ‘Who would?
What’s half an inch under our skin is a
mystery.’ He’s not wrong – a fact brought
home to him just as he’d begun research-
ing his latest book about the human body.
An MRI scan for a hernia, a minor medical
issue, revealed the bestselling author had only
one kidney. It’s not that the other had suddenly
given up. He’d never had a matching pair and had
made it into his 60s without knowing. ‘I had 24
hours of paranoia,’ he says. ‘Apparently, if you
only start with one then it’s pretty robust but the
doctors might as well have told me to stop worry-
ing about death itself. Finding out really drove
home to me how little we know about our insides.’
In his earlier science book, the hugely popular
A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bryson
looked out into the universe. Now, in The Body: A
Guide For occupants, he looks inwards, examining
every inch of us from the head, where hair grows
at the rate of one third of a millimetre a day, to our
feet, which contain 52 of the body’s 206 bones, dou-
ble the number the spine needs to hold us up. This
remarkable new book – ‘it’s a kind of owners’ man-
ual,’ he says – will be serialised exclusively in The
Mail on Sunday over the next three weeks.
What Bryson learned along the way left him so
awestruck he’s now tempted to leave himself to
medical science when he dies. ‘If they’ll have me
- it’s more popular than you think,’ he says. ‘But
being in a dissecting room with cadavers and med-
ical students... that was the day I felt true wonder-
ment. our insides are such a mess, they don’t look
capable of doing all the complicated things humans
do. Above all was how I felt about the brain, which
looks like a large pudding. How can there be human
love in there, just because of electrical impulses?
‘your body is mostly scaffolding and plumbing.
your brain is you. yet 75 to 80 per cent of it is
water and the rest is fat and protein. Imagine
someone giving you a pail of water, some fat and
some protein and being told to shake it up and
make a brain. A very patient computer scientist
calculated that 1.2 billion copies of my book could
be stored in a piece of brain the size of a grain of
salt. If that’s not amazing, you tell me what is.’
It’s this curiosity, humanity and sense of fun
that has seen Bryson become one of Britain’s most
beloved writers since The Lost Continent, his
travelogue around his native America, was pub-
lished in 1989. (It famously begins: ‘I come from
Des Moines. Somebody had to.’) Along the way he
has sold many, many millions of books.
H
E SEEMED to specialise in funny,
gimlet-eyed trips to unfamiliar
places until A Short History of
Nearly Everything stunned
the worlds of science and pub-
lishing in 2003. It
became the big-
gest-selling non-fiction book of
its decade in Britain and the
Royal Society awarded Bryson the
same prize it gave Professor
Stephen Hawking for A Brief
History of Time. Now the nation is
holding its breath (generally you
breathe in and out 20,000 times a
day) for its companion.
In the flesh, Bryson, a 67-year-
old father-of-four and grandfather-
of-ten, is comfortably rumpled with
a greying beard and pebble glasses.
Writing The Body has made him
newly respectful of the one he’s
walking around in but he’s not
planning to change the eating,
drinking and exercise habits that
so endear him to his readers.
‘I have never been vegan or
vegetarian and I would actively
hate to go teetotal. My favourite
drink in the world is red wine.’
Any one in particular? ‘A cheap
one. Something from the bottom
of the supermarket shelf. I love
the taste of a rough table wine –
30 The Mail on Sunday^ September 1^ •^2019
if it costs £3 a bottle, so much
the better.’ He was an ardent smoker
from the age of 14 until his late
30s – ‘I’d come out of school in Des
Moines and light up, thinking I was
real cool’ – and while he stays fit by
walking and gardening, he shunsthe gym. The last time he was slim
was for his daughter’s wedding two
years ago ‘but I did that for her, not
for myself’. What does he weigh? ‘I
don’t know.’ What is his body mass
index? ‘oof, I don’t want to know.’He’s always enjoyed robust good
health. There have been no serious
illnesses or accidents which
inspired him to write The Body and
he was clueless about his single
kidney until after he’d begun writ-
ing the book, which is really a quest
to find out what lies under every-
one’s skin (which you shed at a rate
of 25,000 flakes a minute).
Every page is dense with scien-
tific facts written as vividly as a
thriller, as well as answers to
conundrums such as why we don’t
fall out of bed when we are asleep;
why our own stomach acids don’t
eat us alive; why it’s impossible to
tickle yourself; and why your brain
can only see soap lather as white
when soap itself can be any colour.
It is woven through with the
kind of human stories that Bryson
has made his trademark. There are
tales of selfless endeavour such as
that of Berlin doctor Werner Forss-
mann who, in 1929, stuck a catheter
up the artery in his arm and pushedit around his shoulder, through his
chest and into his heart to see if it
was possible. He feared it might
kill him and when it didn’t, he
walked to the radiology department
of his hospital and asked a col-
league to record his discovery on
X-ray. His experiment revolution-
ised 20th Century heart surgery.
There are amusing stories such
as the sailor who had an at-sea
appendectomy performed by his
ship’s pharmacy assistant armed
with a first-aid manual and wearing
a surgical mask made out of a tea-
bag. (The sailor lived.)
There are several stories of
medical advancement powered by
personal desperation. Take the
American Lawrence brothers: John,
a physician, and Ernest, a nuclear
physicist, deployed a newly invented
particle accelerator Ernest had just
built at Berkeley university to
destroy their mother’s cancer.
The procedure was agonising
but she survived to enjoy another22 years of life, heralding the
age of radiation therapy to
treat cancer.
And then there are profiles
of extraordinary characters
who changed human history.
The godfather of American
surgery, William Halsted,
was addicted to cocaine
after a career spent exper-
imenting with it as
an anaesthetic.
He was a brave and
brilliant doctor, none-
theless. He performed a radical
gall bladder operation on his
mother on the family’s kitchen
table and gave his sister two pints
of his own blood as she haemor-
rhaged following childbirth – one
of the first known transfusions.
Both women recovered. Halsted
never kicked his drug habit but he
went on to invent the surgical glove,
saving many more lives.
Bryson also writes about the
dastardly rivalries of great scien-How Bill
Bryson went
on his most
fascinating
journey yet
...and found
a startling
secret about
HImself!
by
Sarah Oliver
The brain
looks like a big
pudding. How
can there be
love in there?