The book:
This month’s Shelf Improvement choice is a guided tour through the most intimate of landscapes, the human body. Adventures in Human Being was the Observer’s science book of the year 2015 when it came out in hardback. Just published in paperback, it is both immensely insightful and filled with compassion. Francis is the prize-winning author of two books of travel writing, Empire Antarctica and True North, however it is his experience as a doctor from which he draws as he leads us through the fascinating workings of each part of the body.
The physical journey travelled is complemented by diagrams and pictures, but it is Francis’ poetic writing as he weaves in anecdotes, both first-hand and from across history, which makes this such a thoroughly readable work. The book is alive with Francis’ fascination with his subject and his wit at telling it, and while his admiration for the physical majesty of the body is obvious – and welcomely contagious – his thoughtful approach means he never stops being human. We hope you enjoy our Shelf Improvement book this month.
What the Guardian thought:
Francis comes to this book armed with two key attributes. First, he is an award-winning travel writer. His True North is a particularly fine exploration of Europe’s Arctic wildernesses, for example. Second, he is a highly experienced doctor: a former paediatrician, a physician on a long-stay geriatric ward, a trainee in neurosurgery, an expedition medic in the Arctic and Antarctic, and now a GP. This is a man who has seen it, done it, and – most importantly – knows how to write about it.
Take his description of a casualty ward (in Edinburgh) whose main double doors act “like a storm drain, with all the madness and misery of humanity pouring through them”. It is in this setting that a young doctor is expected to learn how to approach every injury and intoxication that men and women can inflict on themselves. “What I didn’t bargain for were the stories,” Francis writes.
With each vignette, we are provided with a smattering of medical insights: the physiological effects of crucifixion (a practice brought to Francis’s mind by the nail through the builder’s palm); details of the boxer’s fracture suffered by the prison warder; and the links between self-harm and abuse suffered in childhood.
It is a fraught catalogue of misfortune, illuminated with flashes of mordant wit. In response to a question about his profession, one powerfully built casualty patient, nursing a shattered fist, replies that he is “a pickpocket, what is it to you?” “Just checking you’re not a concert pianist,” Francis responds.
Francis starts his grand tour of the human frame at the brain. (“I was 19 years old when I first held a human brain,” we are told in the book’s opening, arresting sentence.) Then we head downwards towards the feet and toes in a series of 18 essays on organs that include the kidney, inner ear, genitalia, the rectum – described as “a magnificent work of art” – and the lungs.
It is grand, eloquent stuff, occasionally humorous, frequently moving, and invariably informative. In other hands, Adventures in Human Being might well have become cluttered with cliche, detail or sentimentality but Francis has a lightness of touch that helps him avoid these pitfalls. His use of quotes is sparing but erudite and his lack of self-importance – often a failing in his profession – is welcome. The end result is a thoroughly entertaining, provocative work.
Robin McKie - Read the full review
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