The Unseen Body: A Doctor’s Journey Through the Hidden Wonders of Human Anatomy

In this ambitious if uneven debut, physician and naturalist Reisman offers a “behind-the-scenes look at life itself” via an odyssey through the human body. Accompanied by stories from his experience practicing medicine around the world—“from a clinic in high-altitude Nepal to an emergency room in Arctic Alaska”—each chapter considers a different part of human anatomy to highlight “how those parts compose a whole.” Rather than feature case studies of the sensational oddities, Reisman focuses on the more pedestrian cases that make up the bulk of his career as a generalist—such as “battling the fallout of the throat’s flawed design” in caring for a patient with pneumonia, or walking a middle-aged man through his first heart attack. A particulary striking chapter on feces sees Reisman bluntly challenges taboos surrounding human excrement with the story of a patient whose debilitating diarrhea was treated with an experimental fecal transplant. Notwithstanding the deep curiosity driving his narrative, though, Reisman often slips into clichéd musings—for instance, in an essay on genitalia, he concludes with his own child’s birth, making the trite observation that “nothing would ever be the same.” Though its author is clearly well traveled, this work mostly treads familiar territory. (Oct.)