Adventures in Human Being. By Gavin Francis. Profile; 252 pages; £14.99. To be published in America by Basic Books in October.
GAVIN FRANCIS, a Scottish doctor, has had plenty of adventures, not least 14 months spent as “Zdoc” for a British research mission near the South Pole, the subject of his engaging memoir, “Empire Antarctica”. His new book, “Adventures in Human Being”, stays nearer to home, a journey through the body, from top to tail, inside out, but is no less delightful.
He weaves together the stories of his own patients and their ailments with the poetry of others, drawing on science and history, myth and legend to explore the functioning of the physical form. His writing is spare; Mr Francis makes a virtue of Scottish taciturnity. But his sense of wonder at the human body is clear. Pale retinal spots remind him of cumulus clouds, the retinal arteries of patients with high blood pressure of “jagged forks of lightning”. Gazing upon a newly transplanted kidney, filling with blood, is, he writes, like “watching a process of reanimation: a refutation of death.” The countless capillaries that join mother and child in the womb, enabling new life to grow, seem to him like “a million tiny hands”, their fingers “locked across the placental divide”.
Mr Francis avoids mawkishness, even when his patients are facing death...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Qrevtt
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