Aldersey-Williams takes us on a guided tour of a subject that is both earthily familiar and a great unknown to us: our own bodies. He writes fluently about the history of how our bodies have become known through science and literature, and how that understanding has changed over the centuries. He moves from introducing us to the men and women such as Galton and Hippocrates who have helped us understand the functions of the body to quoting Shakespeare who speaks a great deal about the body, as metaphor, similie and curse. Aldersey-Williams also relates his encounters with a wide range of people who are in themselves experts in their field: neurologists, blood donor nurses, a professional clown, artists (conventional and tattoo), atheletes, pathologists, psychologists and many more. He relates his own experience of witnessing dissections, anatomy lessons and attempting life drawing.
The book is split into three sections which gives it a pleasing and coherant structure. The first part takes 'the whole', narrating how we have historically understood and mapped the human body.
He then goes on to take the parts and how we have come to understand these parts as separate with a chapter on each: head, face, brain, heart, blood, ear, eye, stomach, hand, sex, foot and skin.
And finally he speaks about the future, about meeting a paralympian and how technical innovations can augment and enable our bodies to function.
A real education, a sweeping introduction to the history of how we have come to our current understanding of the human body.
