If you’ve ever wondered why no one wants to kiss you first thing in the morning, it is possibly because your exhalations may contain up to 150 different chemical compounds” including “methyl mercaptan (which smells like very old cabbage), hydrogen sulphide (like rotten eggs), dimethyl sulphide (slimy seaweed)”, etc. There is disagreement over what precisely we do need. In America, the daily recommended dose of vitamin E is 15 milligrams, but in the UK it is 3 to 4 milligrams – a very considerable difference. Bryson feeds the pith, pulp and bitter pips of a subject into his brain and produces a sweet, zingy quantity of juice - this book is a delight. * The Spectator * Many myths about the body are shown and design flaws described, but after billion years of evolution, that´s no wonder. We deliberately build in design flaws in everything we create and call it planned obsolescence and what is an appendix or other useless extra bonus parts compared to that.

I like Bryson, his books are often amusing and informative. He has a good eye for details that will keep the reader engaged or outraged or just smile. This is a tour of the human body, but it includes stories and asides about people associated with the discovery of various diseases or a cure or a system in the body. Some books on this topic can get a bit carried away with long names for parts that involve endless Latin or Greek. A nice thing he does here when he does give these is to say what the words mean in English, often interesting enough in itself, and to say why the person naming it that might have thought that was a good idea.

Even today vitamins are an ill-defined entity. The term describes 13 chemical oddments that we need to function smoothly but are unable to manufacture for ourselves. Though we tend to think of them as closely related, they mostly have little in common apart from being useful to us.

A wonderful successor to A Short History of Nearly Everything, this new book is an instant classic. It will have you marvelling at the form you occupy, and celebrating the genius of your existence, time and time again. The ideal gift for readers of every age who wish to discover more about themselves. By 1950, half of the medicines available for prescription had been invented or discovered in just the previous ten years.So, I've long owned a machine (well, so much more than a machine, though) without a User's Manual, and at last I've laid my hands on one. You should, too. Altogether there are about seven thousand rare diseases – so many that about one person in seventeen in the developed world has one, which isn’t very rare at all. But, sadly, so long as a disease affects only a small number of people it is unlikely to get much research attention. For 90 per cent of rare diseases there are no effective treatments at all.” It's many years since I studied Biology at school yet many of the principles I learnt are discussed in this book (and it is a discussion as BB is continually having a conversation with himself) - much of the basic facts have remained the same whilst many of the details have moved on or been disproved. of us will discover that we have cancer at some point in our lives. Many, many more of us will have it but die of something else first. The 18th & 19th centuries were very bad....medicine sank into a kind of dark age. You could hardly imagine more misguided and counterproductive practices than those to which physicians became attached in the eighteenth century, and even much of the nineteenth.