ADDENDA


Book review: Adventures in Human Being


By Gavin Francis Profile Books; £14.99 hardback Review by Jim Killgore, managing editor


Object obscura:


Roman denture This is a copy of an original Roman denture dating from 400 BC Satricum, (Conca), Italy. Roman dentists made bridges of gold to hold extracted teeth without roots, or false teeth of ivory or metal. These techniques were learned from the Etruscans, who were the first people to make false teeth around 700 BC. Source: Science Museum


Crossword 2


1 7 8 9 10 11 12


“AS a child I didn’t want to be a doctor, I wanted to be a geographer,” writes Gavin Francis in the first line of the prologue


to his new book Adventures in Human Being. It is almost by way of explanation as to why the author and GP would follow two popular travel adventures – first in the Arctic (True North) and then as a resident medic on a remote British ice station (Empire Antarctica) – with a fascinating riff on human anatomy and medicine. Here Francis turns his geographer’s eye inward on a “journey


3 4 5 6 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23


ACROSS 1 Journeys (7) 5 Brushed (5) 7 Male only cancer (10) 9 Validate (5) 11 Casual tops (1-6) 13 “Accreditation of competences” – GMC (13)


16 Albums (7) 19 Colours made from black and white (5)


21 Manage a complex activity (10) 23 On which we put bums (5) 24 Suffered with overwork (7)


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DOWN 1 Takes part in election (5) 2 Affirmative (3) 3 Spy (7) 4 Prevent from growing (5) 5 Collision (5) 6 American cardiologist, Helen _______ (7)


8 Flattery (6) 10 Business providing a service (6) 12 Stick attached to foot for winter sport (3)


13 Floor coverings (7) 14 Silently agree (3) 15 Worse than the Hulk? (7) 17 Upper coverings of buildings (5)


18 Newly-qualified doctor (US colloq.) (5)


20 Exhausted (5) 22 Gone by (3)


See answers online at www.mddus.com. Go to the Notice Board page under News and Events.


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through the most intimate landscape of all: our own bodies”. In a series of linked essays ordered from head to toe “like certain anatomy texts” Francis explores how culture “continually reshapes the ways we imagine and inhabit the body”. It is both an eclectic collection of medical curiosities and a thoughtful and sometimes moving account of his own encounters with the human landscape in his varied career as a doctor. Starting in chapter one he describes first attending neuroanatomy lab as a medical student (“forty brains in buckets”) and finding the pineal body which Descartes described as the “seat of the soul” – that leading into an account of his later training observing a neurosurgeon mapping “eloquent” tissue on the surface of the brain to preserve speech function in a woman undergoing a procedure to treat severe intractable epilepsy. So it goes with each part of the body: an account of how


Leonardo da Vinci’s meticulous dissection and drawings of facial muscles in cadavers echoed his earlier appreciation of human expression as captured in his painting of The Last Supper, or a motorcycle accident leading to a consideration of shoulder injury as depicted by Homer in the fall of Troy. The broad sweep of the material is subtly handled and never


feels laboured or over intellectual. It is also quite funny in places. In the chapter entitled ‘Wrist & Hand: Punched, Cut & Crucified’, Francis asks an emergency room patient with a smashed fist of questionable origin: “What’s your job?” “I’m a pickpocket,” he says with a wry smile. “What’s it to


you?” To which Francis replies: “Just checking you weren’t a concert


pianist.” SUMMONS


PHOTOGRAPH: SCIENCE & SOCIETY


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