The Body: A Guide for Occupants - Bill Bryson (re-read)

This is my first time reading The Body since its initial release. Like all Bryson books, it’s an entertaining, funny read. Bryson’s books generally fall into two categories: travelogues, in which Bryson chronicles his journey through a particular part of the world, and researched books, in which he chooses a subject and explains it in layman’s terms. The Body, as the name suggests, is among the latter.

Bryson’s output has skewed towards research books in his later years, quite possibly because he’s less inclined to take long journeys. He is very good at both, and while the travelogues tend to be funnier (I would count his funniest book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, among this group, even though the “travel” is through his own childhood), The Body still includes humour through bizarre anecdotes and clever turns of phrase. The overall content, however, is educational, as Bryson works his way through the human body section by section, branching off near the end into disease and medicine. The final chapter, fittingly enough, deals with death, and the process of dying. It ends a bit abruptly, but then again so does life in a lot of cases, so perhaps that’s fitting in its way.

Bryson peppers his chapters with anecdotes about figures in medicine and biology both famous and obscure, charting medical breakthroughs and quack remedy fads with equal relish. He has always had an ear for bizarre stories and seems to delight in bringing forgotten heroes a bit of posthumous fame.

There isn’t a Bill Bryson book I haven’t read at least once, and nearly all of them I’ve gone through multiple times. It saddens me to hear that he intends for The Body to be his last book, but he’s certainly earned his retirement. Nevertheless, I can’t say I’m not hoping that boredom gets the better of him and he finds his way into a new one at some point.

Note: in preparing the tags for this entry, I discovered I’ve already written about this book once before! Oh well, interesting to capture my views on it a second time.

The Body: a guide for occupants - bill bryson

You can divide Bill Bryson's books into two categories. First are his more narrative works, which are generally travelogues (though I would count Thunderbolt Kid among this group as well), and comprise longer stories of his experiences supplemented with occasional diversions. Second would be his educational works, which choose a subject and explore its deepest chasms for nuggets of arcane interest.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants, as the name suggests, is of the second type, and its subject is self-evident. Bryson leads the reader through the body's many components, as well as branching of into related topics such as medicine. There are small anecdotes peppered throughout, but little in the way of narrative.

In his later years, Bryson has transitioned from a writer primarily of his first type to his second, and while his research is impressive and his writing always informative, I must say I like him best in a more narrative mood, as his gifts for description and flow often go unrealized in his educational books. There's also less room for his humor to reach its full momentum, though no Bryson book is without it’s funny lines. I enjoyed this one, but it may be a while before I read it again, and unlikely that it will enter tier one rotation along with his greatest works, like Thunderbolt Kid, A Walk in the Woods, and A Short History of Nearly Everything (his finest educational book).

The Shame of the States - Albert Deutsch

The Shame of the States is not the book I’d pictured it to be. Having come across a reference to it in Edward Shorter’s A History of Psychiaty, I’d imagined it as a kind of proto-gonzo journalism in the vein of Black Like Me, where Deutsch would masquerade as someone with mental health issues in order to expose the deplorable conditions of insane asylums. To be sure, there is an exposé element to The Shame of the States, but it is not one reach through duplicity. Deutsch announced his intentions to every one of the asylums he visits, and stresses that in the majority of cases he was welcomed with open arms.

That is not to say that the conditions he saw were favorable, or that he pulled any punches in his reporting. Rather, it speaks to the desperation in which asylum administrators found themselves—hopelessly underfunded and overworked, with barely trained staff and annual turnover rates approaching 100%—that they willingly exposed the foetid underbellies of their institutions in the hopes that learning of their appalling conditions would shock the public out of complacency, and that their outrage would trickle down to the politicians holding the purse strings.

I can’t say whether Deutsch’s book was successful in that regard, though I can say the picture he paints is vivid and heartbreaking, full of people in restraints or slumped in chairs, of beds filling a room so completely there is no space left to walk around them, of crumbling walls and ceiling bubbling with rot. Deutsch brought a photographer with him to every asylum he visited, and the photos he captured further underscore the squalid conditions of most of these institutions.

Though writing with the restrained, clinical prose of a seasoned journalist for most of his observations, Deutsch cannot restrain his seething anger at the state of affairs he witnesses, and the book contains a number of passages in which he allows himself the freedom to editorialize. The case studies make up the bulk of the text, but the book has other facets as well, making it part history, part journalism, part treatise.

Deutsch’s compassion for his subjects cannot be denied, though the age of the book means that some of the language he uses can be jarring to a modern reader. He refers to people with mental disabilities as “mentally defective” and “feeble-minded,” and regularly throws about the term idiot as a descriptor. People with Down Syndrome are referred to as “Mongolian Idiots.” I admit I cringed a bit at some of these passages, though it’s worth reiterating that Deutsch employs these terms without malice, and that the phrases he uses were at the time blandly clinical. He even makes a point of distinguishing between morons, imbeciles, and idiots, terms that signified increasingly severe levels of cognitive delay. “Idiot” and “moron” have been so thoroughly expunged of their clinical roots, that it is almost impossible to hear them as anything other than insults. Seeing them presented this way is an interesting reminder of how language changes over time.

A History of Psychiatry - Edward Shorter

The premise of Edward Shorter’s A History of Psychiatry is interesting. The brain remains the one piece of human anatomy whose inner workings we have not yet fully understood, and so an overview of our efforts to treat neurological illnesses seems like it would lead down some dark and intriguing alleyways. And so it does. Shorter provides a thorough chronicle of the different stages of psychiatric medicine, from the first efforts to house the mentally ill in asylums to the wonders of modern pharmaceuticals. The description of these phases was interesting, but strangely the least engaging aspect of Shorter’s chronicle was the human element. Shorter treats the book like a Who’s Who of psychiatric history, and the litany of names drone out paragraph after paragraph, each tagged with a brief description of the individual’s accomplishments before stepping aside to make room for the next shout out. Some names reappear pages later, vaguely attributed, leaving you scratching your head and wondering which of the 50 people you’ve just learned about this one is. I can’t fault Shorter for wanting to cite those responsible for psychiatry’s various accomplishments, but a more in-depth study of fewer players would have gone down a lot easier.

The cluttered prose is an inconvenience, but my biggest issue with the book was its editorializing. Shorter admits early on that he has a certain slant, which is admirable, but a history should strive for some level of objectivity. By contrast, Shorter’s preference for some schools of thought over others is apparent throughout the text—every figure associated with biological psychiatry, however slight their contribution, gets a solid 300 words, while major figures of psychotherapy are glossed over. Carl Jung is mentioned perhaps twice, both times in passing, and without any regard to his work or theories.

This editorializing by omission descends into something almost resembling a rant once it reaches the modern day. His dismisses patients with PTSD, anorexia, and moderate forms of depression, anxiety and OCD as little more than whiners who foisted their diagnoses on a hapless DSM committee through political strong-arming. There remains some validity to his criticisms of how the DSM was and is put together, but his cavalier dismissal of serious illnesses—some of which I’ve witnessed firsthand—was pretty gross. He walks this dismissal back in later pages, making it difficult to discern his exact stance on them, but either way the entire final chapter felt far too editorial in tone.