There’s no end to the wonders of the human body, says Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson has come a long way from being the funniest, most irreverent travel writer around. He’s still as amiable, avuncular and amusing as ever, but his subject matter has broadened over the decades to cover nearly everything, from science to Shakespeare. His modus operandi, however, has not changed. He absorbs reams of facts, the most interesting of which he presents liberally sprinkled with mischief, wit and lateral thinking.

On seeing this book’s title, I prepared myself for the arid science I ingested when I studied to be first a doctor, then a hospital physician and then a consultant anaesthetist. But I needn’t have worried. Bryson feeds the pith, pulp and bitter pips of a subject into his brain and produces a sweet, zingy quantity of juice.

It is no mean feat to capture the essence of the human body and the history of medicine and modern clinical practice in a single volume, but Bryson manages it phenomenally well. His approach is to dazzle with fascinating data, and to flesh out the lives of pioneers — often with gossip about their irascibility, tax-dodging or the hijacking of their discoveries by colleagues — following this by interviewing an expert practising in the same field today. It must have been a time-consuming endeavour, but he retains his humour and awe throughout, and his enthusiasm is infectious.

Who knew, for example, that the length of our blood vessels laid end to end would take one 2.5 times around the Earth? There are dozens of these bamboozling statistics, which I found myself googling to confirm. And yes, all the DNA in the human body laid in one fine strand would really stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.

Bryson’s combination of curiosity, colloquial vernacular (the ‘chomping’ of skin mites feeding on dead skin cells; ‘snot’ when discussing viral spread) and refreshingly oblique view makes him always entertaining, even when explaining something — such as bacteria — that no one has ever rendered amusing before.