It was an underpaid medical student named Henry Vandyke Carter who did most of the dissections and every one of the drawings for Gray’s 1858 classic anatomy text, the one that no one ever calls “Gray’s and Carter’s Anatomy.”īryson starts off with a short review of the market price of the chemical components of the human body (anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few hundred thousand, depending on which set of experts you believe). Meanwhile, everyone else will be interested to learn that the renowned British anatomist Henry Gray was, like so many of the medical scientists Bryson encounters on his travels, remarkably adept at elbowing colleagues out of the way for fame and fortune. If lengthy detours to marginally relevant yet potentially evocative and thought-provoking minutiae irritate you, stop right here: Bryson’s book will irritate you, too, and you should go read Gray’s Anatomy cover to cover instead. The previous parenthetical observation is a test. For one thing, the first movie memorably stars a tiny Raquel Welch, although a 1993 remake of the Disney movie does feature Sally Field voicing the cat’s lines, in what might be considered a similar miniaturization of an outsize screen personality.)īOOK REVIEW - 'The Body: A Guide for Occupants', by Bill Bryson (Doubleday, 464 pages). ( Fantastic Voyage should not be confused with Disney’s 1963 Incredible Journey, in which two lost dogs and a cat travel the northern forests of Canada to get home. Readers of a certain age may flash back to 20th Century Fox’s Fantastic Voyage, a 1966 movie of forgettable plot but remarkable special effects, in which a team of scientists shrink to microbial size and travel the body’s tubes and vessels against a background of giant blood cells and shiny, pulsating organs.

Now Bryson has turned to the human body with The Body: A Guide for Occupants, meandering around its organs in his usual leisurely, amused way, always on the lookout for interesting landmarks and overlooked perspectives. He’s an award-winning author whose writing has led him up the Appalachian Trail, around the United States, and Britain, and through the history of science and language, a writer whose breadth of interest and felicitous style make both fact and anecdote go down easy. Bill Bryson is an excellent companion for a trip - it can be a physical journey or an intellectual one, doesn’t really matter which.

Bill bryson the body review