As a doctor working in general practice and emergency medicine, I am conscious that until relatively recently physicians saw a natural parallel between the body and the environment: they assumed that the four elements of matter corresponded with the four humours that sustained health. Some of the earliest anatomical textbooks were called microcosmographies, as if to acknowledge that our bodies are reflections in miniature of the cosmos.
Adventures in Human Being is a kind of literary map of the human body from cultural, philosophical and medical perspectives. I wanted it to draw on that holistic attitude and celebrate some of humanity’s rich traditions of imagining and understanding the body. At the same time, it takes inspiration from the stories that I hear every day in my own clinics.
There are 18 chapters in the book, each of which explores a single part of the body from just one of many possible perspectives. It wasn’t possible to be comprehensive: we are composed of multitudes of parts, and scores of ailments afflict every one of them. There are two chapters on the brain: the first explores how it felt to work as a junior neurosurgeon, and the second comes from psychiatry, discussing the use and abuse of electroconvulsive therapy.
There’s no hierarchy to this approach to the body: the foot and the rectum were granted as much significance as the heart and the face; sex and pregnancy were given as much importance as death and dying – just as they are in clinical practice. The book also touches on the way some of our attitudes to the body have changed over the centuries, while others have stayed the same: one section discusses the latest applications of stem cell research, while another explores 3,000-year-old medical insights from Homer’s Iliad.
I divide my time between writing and doctoring. My first book explored the places, history and human geography of the European Arctic; my second examined a year spent living in the empty, elemental landscape of Antarctica. It makes little difference whether the landscape I’m writing about is geographical, cultural, or anatomical – as a writer, the same approaches apply.
As a boy I wanted to be a geographer, not a doctor, and would spend hours in imaginary travels through the pages of an atlas. Later, as a medical student and then anatomy tutor, I continued my habit of atlas-travelling, though by then I’d switched to anatomical rather than geographical ones. The chapters of this book trace some of those paths, and each is a kind of adventure: journeying through the landscapes of the human body as well as the emotional and social landscapes of my patients’ lives.
Extract
I journey through the body as I listen to my patients’ lungs, manipulate their joints, or gaze in through their pupils, aware not just of each individual and his or her anatomy but the bodies of all those I’ve examined in the past. All of us have landscapes that we consider special: places that are charged with meaning, for which we feel affection or reverence. The body has become that sort of landscape for me; every inch of it is familiar and carries powerful memories.
Imagining the body as a mirror of the world that sustains us can be difficult in the centre of a city. In terms of geography, my practice area is relatively narrow – it’s still possible to visit all of my patients by bicycle – but the cross-section of humanity it encompasses is broad. It takes in streets of opulent wealth as well as housing estates of startling poverty, solid professional quarters as well as the student apartments of a university. To be welcomed equally at the crib of a newborn and in a nursing home, at a four-poster death bed and in a squalid bedsit, is a rare privilege. My profession is like a passport or skeleton key to open doors ordinarily closed; to stand witness to private suffering and, where possible, ease it. Often even that modest goal is unreachable – for the most part it’s not about dramatically saving lives, but quietly, methodically, trying to postpone death.
More about Adventures in Human Being
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 a builder’s palm); details of the boxer’s fracture suffered by a 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. - Robin McKie
Buy the book
Adventures in Human Being is published by Profile Books at £8.99 and is available from the Guardian bookshop at £7.19.
