The Body, page 48
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ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
1Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2019 / Bridgeman Images
2© Photo Researchers / Mary Evans Picture Library
3Wolf Suschitzky / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty Images
4Granger / Bridgeman Images
5Bettmann / Getty Images
6Wellcome Collection
7Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia
8Granger / Bridgeman Images
9Nationaal Archief / Collectie Spaarnestad / ANP / Bridgeman Images
10Louis Washkansky, Popperfoto / Getty Images
11Wellcome Collection
12Minneapolis Public Library Collection, Audio-Visual Department, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum
13Keystone-France / Getty Images
14Wellcome Collection
15Bridgeman Images
16© SZ Photo / Scherl / Bridgeman Images
17Hulton Archive / Getty Images
18Wellcome Images
19© Ken Welsh / Bridgeman Images
20Wellcome Collection
21© King’s College London / Mary Evans Picture Library
22Wellcome Collection
23Bettmann / Getty Images
24Bettmann / Getty Images
25Topham Picturepoint © 1999
26Wallace Kirkland / Getty Images
27Granger / Bridgeman Images
28Keystone-France / Getty Images
29Heritage Image Partnership Ltd /Alamy Stock Photo
30INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo
31Ernst Gräfenberg, Museum of Contraception and Abortion, Vienna
32Neil Harding / Getty Images
33Dr Yorgos Nikas / Science Photo Library/Getty Images
34Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo
35Wellcome Collection
36Keystone-France / Getty Images
37Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo
38Wellcome Collection
39Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Getty Images
40Getty Images
41Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo
A Leonardo da Vinci drawing of the human body showing blood circulation, c. 1490. It took surprisingly long for medical science to take an active interest in what was inside us and how it worked. Leonardo was one of the first to dissect the human body, but even he noted that he found it disgusting.
Photograph of Alphonse Bertillon, 1893. The French policeman Bertillon invented the system of identification that became known as Bertillonage, which involved measuring the body parts and individual markings of every arrested person.
Alexander Fleming, photographed in 1945, the year he, Ernst Chain, and Howard Florey shared a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. By then the Scottish biologist and physician had become famous as the father of penicillin.
Ernst Chain, German-born biochemist based at Oxford, pictured here in 1944. Pathologically terrified of being poisoned in his lab, he nevertheless went on to discover that penicillin not only killed pathogens in mice but had no evident side effects.
Walter Freeman, at work on one of the several thousand lobotomies he performed on patients across America during the mid-twentieth century. He used an ice pick to access his patients’ brains through their eye sockets. Note the lack of mask, gown, and gloves.
Drawing by Cesare Lombroso dated 1888. The important and influential nineteenth-century Italian physiologist and criminologist developed a theory that criminality was inherited and that criminal instincts could be identified in features such as the slope of a forehead or the shape of an earlobe.
X-ray of Case 1071, in which four large safety pins were impacted in the esophagus of a nine-month-old child. Chevalier Quixote Jackson described this as his most difficult operation in a long career of removing swallowed objects and a reminder never to leave open safety pins within reach of small children—although in this case the baby’s sister had fed the pins to her.
Illustration dated 1727 of the Reverend Stephen Hales supervising the insertion of a tube into an unfortunate horse’s carotid artery in order to measure its blood pressure.
Werner Forssmann, who as a young doctor, out of curiosity and without any idea of the possible consequences, fed a catheter into an artery in his arm to see if he could reach his heart. He is photographed here twenty-seven years later, in 1956, the year he won a Nobel Prize for his revolutionary research.
Louis Washkansky, recipient of the world’s first heart transplant, in a hospital in Cape Town in 1967 soon after the procedure. While the operation was hailed as a breakthrough, he died eighteen days afterward.
William Harvey demonstrating to Charles I how blood circulates and the heart works. His theories were pretty much in line with our understanding now but were ridiculed at the time.
George Edward Bamberger and Charles Evan Watkins on their fifth birthday. The children were born in the same Chicago hospital in 1930, mislabeled, and sent home with the wrong parents; the error was not corrected until blood tests, at the time the height of technical sophistication, revealed who their true parents were.
Karl Landsteiner’s research in Vienna at the start of the twentieth century marks the beginning of a modern understanding of blood; he established that it can be divided into different groups, which he labeled A, B, and O.
A 1707 illustration of a lithotomy, the procedure used for centuries to remove gallstones.
Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, who in the late 1880s, at the age of seventy-two, became famous for grinding up the testes of domestic animals in order to inject himself with the extract. He reported feeling “frisky as a forty-year-old,” but it seriously damaged his scientific credibility with his peers.
Adolf Butenandt, the German biochemist and hormone expert, displaying the fencing scar of which he was so proud.
Canadian general practitioner Frederick Banting (right) and Toronto University laboratory assistant Charles Best, with whom Banting conducted his remarkably amateur but nevertheless successful trials on dogs in an attempt to cure diabetes. They are shown here in 1921 with one of the dogs from their lab.
Photograph of Case VI: a young girl photographed before and after she was treated with insulin.
The skeletons of the celebrated “Irish giant” Charles Byrne, the tallest man in Europe when he died in 1783, and Caroline Crachami, known as the “Sicilian dwarf” (who died aged nine, measuring nineteen and a half inches, in 1824).
A page from Gray’s Anatomy, first published in 1858. Henry Vandyke Carter’s illustration shows the blood vessels of the neck.
The dissecting room of St. George’s Hospital, photographed in 1860. Henry Gray, the author of Gray’s Anatomy, sits next to the cadaver’s feet, center left.
Walter Bradford Cannon, the “father of homeostasis”—our ability to maintain internal stability—in 1934: a genius whose stern expression belied a warm demeanor and a remarkable skill for persuading people to do uncomfortable things in the name of science.
Richard Herrick being wheeled out of the hospital by his identical twin brother, Ronald, after the world’s first kidney transplant in 1954.
British zoologist Peter Medawar in his laboratory at University College, London, having received the 1960 Nobel Prize for his pioneering studies of the immune system.
The interior of Wilbur Atwater’s respiratory calorimeter, in which the subjects of his experiments would be confined for up five days at a time while Atwater and his assistants measured everything they ate, breathed, and excreted.
One of the thirty-six conscientious objectors who, toward the end of World War II, volunteered to be systematically starved for nutritionist Ancel Keys’s study at the University of Minnesota.
William Beaumont, painted at the scene of one of the 238 experiments he conducted on Alexis St. Martin during the 1820s. Beaumont is shown holding part of the length of silk he has inserted through the open wound in St. Martin’s stomach to examine the effects of his gastric juices.
French scientist Michel Siffre being hauled out of a cave deep inside a mountain in the Alps in 1962, after a self-imposed eight weeks spent isolated without daylight or any other clue to the passage of time.
Nettie Stevens, who, while studying the reproductive organs of mealworms in Pennsylvania in 1905, discovered the Y chromosome.
Ernst Gräfenberg, the German gynecologist who fled Nazi Germany for America, where he developed the intrauterine device first known as the Gräfenberg ring, and in 1944 identified an erogenous spot on the wall of the vagina: the Gräfenberg or G spot.
Early-nineteenth-century lithograph of a doctor examining his patient. For most of recorded history we have known shockingly little about how women are put together.
A six-week-old human embryo. It is about the size of a lentil and its heart is beating at one hundred beats per minute.
The human embryo at day three and eight-cell stage.
Joseph Lister, the pioneer in antiseptic surgery, using carbolic acid spray during surgery at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
The brilliant British scientist and Boy’s Own hero Charles Scott Sherrington (right), to whom we owe much of our understanding of the central nervous system. He is photographed in 1938 with his former student Harvey Cushing.
London telephone operators perform a disinfectant mouthwash to fight the influenza epidemic, c. 1920.
A nurse at a sanatorium in the 1920s reads to tuberculosis patients taking fresh air while swaddled in blankets.
Dutch drawing of a mastectomy, seventeenth-century style: the breast is removed with a “tenaculum helvetianum,” a type of forceps. Note the set of cautery irons smoldering in a pan on the left.
The brilliant American physicist Ernest Lawrence (bottom left) with a cyclotron, the particle accelerator he invented to energize protons, which doubled as a radiation gun that he used to cure his mother’s cancer.
Albert Schatz, who discovered that soil microbes would provide the world with an additional antibiotic to penicillin, overseen by his supervisor, Selman Waksman, who took all the credit.
Alois Alzheimer, the Bavarian pathologist and psychiatrist whose 1906 report and lectures on pre-senile dementia in his patient Auguste Deter established the condition that became known as Alzheimer’s disease.
Auguste Deter first presented herself to Alois Alzheimer in 1901 at the age of fifty-one complaining of forgetfulness. When she died five years later, Alzheimer found her brain to be riddled with destroyed cells. She is the first person to have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bill Bryson’s bestselling books include A Walk in the Woods, Notes from a Small Island, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country, A Short History of Nearly Everything (which earned him the 2004 Aventis Prize and the European Union’s Descartes Prize), The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, At Home, and One Summer. He is a former chancellor of Durham University and is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Kavli Institute of Particle Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He lives in England with his wife.
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Bill Bryson, The Body
