The Body

The Body — summary

A 13-pound iron rod and a $151,578 grocery list

In September 1848, a 25-year-old railroad foreman named Phineas Gage was packing dynamite into a hole in a Vermont rock face when something went wrong. The charge fired early. A two-foot tamping rod, an inch and a quarter thick and weighing more than thirteen pounds, shot up through his left cheek, passed behind his eye, and exited through the top of his skull, landing some distance away. By any sensible accounting, Gage should have died on the spot. Instead, he sat up, rode a cart into town, and walked into the doctor's office under his own power. He lived another twelve years. But he was not, as everyone who knew him put it, the same man. The cheerful, dependable foreman had become moody, profane, and unreliable. A piece of physical material had passed through a brain, and a personality had been altered.

Bill Bryson opens "The Body" with stories like this one because they puncture our assumption that we know what we are made of. We don't. In 2013, a research team at Cambridge calculated the precise market price of every element in a human being, using the actor Benedict Cumberbatch as the template. The total came to $151,578.46. A separate calculation by PBS the same year produced a price tag of $168. That's how thin the consensus is. Bryson's biology teacher had told him as a boy that you could buy a human's worth of chemicals at the hardware store for $5. Forty years later, when Bryson sat down to write this book, he discovered that nobody really knew, and that this uncertainty extended to almost every part of the body, from the shape of our chins to the function of our sinuses to why we sleep at all.