The Unseen Body: A Doctor's Journey through the Hidden Wonders of Human Anatomy by Jonathan Reisman, M.D.

 

  Due to the nature of my work, I love to read books about functional anatomy and movement. I love what I do and I like to read and learn as much as I can. However, I do not review these books in my blog because I assume they may be of no interest to the general audience of My Writing Life. However, when I searched for these books a while ago, I came across The Unseen Body: A Doctor’s Journey Through the Hidden Wonders of Human Anatomy, by Jonathan Reisman. The title intrigued me, so I borrowed it from the library and I soon realised it would be a good choice for My Writing Life: Awareness, Reflection, Inspiration.

  The book delights the reader with a unique, captivating style of writing, delving into a thorough exploration of the human body. Each chapter focuses on a specific part or system of the human body. In didactic ways, the doctor explains how sometimes those systems or parts of the body are compromised due to specific medical conditions. Moreover, Dr. Reisman shares several personal experiences as a doctor and a medical student. He has practiced medicine in various medical settings. For instance, he travelled to India and he shares interesting anecdotes about his work there.

   The Unseen Body will pique the interest of medical students, physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals, but it will also entertain audiences that simply have an interest in the human body.

   There are cases of patients that I will never forget. For example, the case of Juan, a patient he took care of when Dr. Reisman was a medical resident. It was shocking to learn what Juan went through. 

  Juan’s liver failed in response to a simple antibiotic treatment. He did not drink alcohol; he did not take drugs; he was not a smoker, either, but one day he had some kind of infection that required the use of an antibiotic and his liver failed in response to it. It bothered me that Dr. Reisman did not mention the name of the antibiotic Juan had been prescribed, but his book does that. Sometimes it misses important details. The bottom line was that through no fault of his own, Juan’s liver went downhill and the only solution to save his life was to have a liver transplant. During the months he waited for a liver, Juan endured several complications. 

  Dr. Reisman did his best to address every complication. He did not think Juan would survive, but when Dr. Reisman was transferred to another medical unit, the awaited liver arrived. Juan’s life was saved thanks to the procedure and the medical care he received.

 Stories like this one make us cherish every moment of health we have in our lives.

  Juan’s experience made me think about the parts of our lives that are outside of our control… it made me reflect on the miracle of being alive and healthy each and every day. This may be something that many people take for granted, but losing one’s health can be a death sentence for some people in America…

  Juan’s story also made me thankful for the medical teams that specialize in this medical field. I’ve had friends working in this field. Reading about Juan made me remember them with renewed appreciation and gratitude.

    The Unseen Body adopts a very introspective outlook. It explores several medical conditions through the life stories of patients. It also offers the wisdom that emerged from the personal experiences that shaped Dr. Reisman as a human being and as a physician.  

  I was impressed by Dr. Reisman’s writing skills. He is gifted with a rich imagination and an ardent curiosity about the human body. Through unique comparisons and descriptions, he offers a creative way of revealing the human body, embarking on a narrative that turns out to be adventurous and even poetical at times.

  He educates the audience on the evolving nature of new therapies and ways of understanding different systems of the human body. He describes himself as both a physician and a naturalist.

  His reflections on the relationship with patients are insightful. The chapter about eyes meditates for a moment on the eye connection as a meaningful part of human communication.

 “Eyes become crucial here since they carry a heavy social weight in the doctor-patient relationship, just as they do outside of healthcare. The eyes of other people are a natural focal point for our own gaze—when we look at others, we generally look at their eyes, as if we believe each individual self rests, more than anywhere else in the body, within the organs of vision. Eye contact is the epitome of human connection and one of the first social behaviors seen in young infants.”

 I want to challenge Dr. Reisman to understand that gazes and eyes are not unique to human connection. For example, we can feel a strong connection with our furry friends through our gazes. This appears to be beyond the scope of Dr. Reisman’s interest and care even though he calls himself a “naturalist.”

    It was distressing to learn about the challenges he faced when he had to look after a morbidly obese woman who required an urgent computed tomography that could not be done due to her weight. He had to call several hospitals to find one that would accept her. It was a heartbreaking experience. 

  When Dr. Reisman discusses obesity, however, he blames physicians for not having clear recommendations on how to address the problem of obesity. He blatantly ignores the research on adequate nutrition to prevent and treat obesity. For example, the research on the benefits of plant-based diets for obesity is well established. We know that drinking sugary drinks will not help them because pop drinks provide calories without nutrition; we know that hyper processed foods are a common problem in this population of patients. The benefits of incorporating an adequate intake of fresh vegetables and fruits into their diets should not be underestimated. Yet Dr Reisman ignores this information in his book, putting more people at risk. I suspect that better education on adequate nutrition would help to reduce the number of patients he has to see in his daily practice.

  Dr. Reisman discusses new therapies for various medical conditions. For example, he describes the use of fecal microbiota transplantation in selected cases of patients whose Clostridium Difficile diarrhea does not respond to treatment. Unfortunately, he missed an opportunity to explain how to help maintain the health of the microbiome on a regular basis. I also noticed that he also fails to address the topic of climate change in relation to human health.

  Last but not least, I was very disappointed in the fact that he ignores the need for empathy toward non-human animals. He does not appear to have any awareness on the emotional lives of non-human animals. I found this disconcerting. I think he will benefit from reading the book The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion and Coexistence in the Human Age by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce.

   Dr. Reisman’s book is an adventurous exploration of the human body, and there are several fascinating topics that make the read entertaining and engrossing, but his lack of empathy for non-human animals is evident and deeply disturbing. I also believe that he missed an opportunity to encourage readers to improve their diets and to make mindful choices that support not only their health but also the health of the planet we inhabit.

 

Relevant links:

 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1530891X24005135

 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9493195/

 

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/this-dietary-pattern-could-save-lives-and-the-planet/

   Jonathan Reisman is a doctor of internal medicine and pediatrics who has practiced medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital as well as in the world’s most remote places—in the Arctic and Antarctica, at high altitude in Nepal, in Kolkata’s urban slums, and among the Oglala Sioux in South Dakota. He lives with his family in Philadelphia.

  If you enjoyed this post, feel feel to read my writing on the following books:

The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion and Coexistence in the Human Age by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce.

Gaia's Own: Every Child's Guide to Living in Harmony with Nature by Darshana Bajaj.

Owner Of A Lonely Heart by Beth Nguyen

 

  It is heartwarming to discover a sense of familiarity and kinship in somebody who has a different background, and this is what happened to me every time I came across Beth Nguyen’s descriptions of her grandmother.

  “My grandmother Noi has been gone for almost fifteen years. I use the word gone because somehow it makes more sense to me than the word dead.” My understanding of her words did not need any more explanations, but I still welcomed her wish to clarify her statement.

  “I know she is gone, but, at the same time, I do not feel that she has left us. The feeling of who she was to me—safety, care, generosity-- stays with me.”

   These mesmerizing moments of connection threw me into a delightful journey of introspection and reflection. There is more, of course, about Noi, so I will let you explore those passages yourself from her book Owner of a Lonely Heart.

   Noi was fifty-five years old when she migrated to the United States of America from Vietnam. She left Vietnam in the summer of 1975. Beth Nguyen was only eight months old when they moved to the United States of America as a way to survive the war. Her father and uncles migrated with them. 

 They had to leave because her dad and uncles had been in the South Vietnamese military. The end of the war meant reeducation camps for them, or something even worse. Beth's mother, on the other hand, was left behind in Vietnam and would move to the United States years later. Beth would grow up in America without her mother, but she would have a step-mother instead…

   Owner of A Lonely Heart is a memoir about Beth's childhood and youth and about motherhood. It plunges into the depths of what has been unsaid for so long.

  She explores the experience of growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as a refugee and an immigrant. Beth belonged to a family of newcomers, and she carried their fear within her. The fear of not knowing what most people were supposed to know. The fear of not knowing the slang, the words, the habits that shaped what the mainstream considered what it means to be “American.” She illustrates this reality with several examples.

 “Always there was a sense of not knowing how things were supposed to be done. Who would even think to tell us? In your first experience of winter and snow, how would you know what to do with an iced-over windshield? In a pre-internet world, how would you know there was a thing called a scraper?”

   As a girl the fear she carried inside herself propelled her toward the library, where she found a refuge in the books she read, in the stories she sought, in the knowledge of the language she obsessed over since she was little.

  The world around her was hostile. If her family asked questions in stores, people would just stare. They may tell you “to go where you came from all the time, as if you could, and they looked at you as the enemy because they did not understand the war, and to them all Vietnamese were the same.”

   The narrative she heard about the war came from “white people and their movies, their gaze, their versions, their depictions of Vietnamese bodies as disposable sites of violence and blame determined the stories that most Americans knew.”

  How is it possible to be a person when one is subjected to the violence of prejudices, stereotypes and misconceptions? She somehow grew up with a social message she could not ignore: “If you’re Asian in America, you’ll always be regarded as foreign, at least a little bit suspect, a possible carrier of diseases and viruses. For those of us who grew up here it’s nearly impossible to avoid the effects of these views.”

  When the COVID pandemic hit the United States of America, the effects of these prejudices erupted in full force. The politicians in charge referred to the COVID virus as the “Chinese flu” and blamed immigrants from China. As a result of this hateful message, hate crimes against Asian people proliferated. For example, a white man murdered eight people, six of them were Asian women at three spas in Atlanta. Elders were being shoved on the streets. Asians were being punched and attacked on sidewalks and subways.

     Many years earlier, Beth Nguyen had endured a very unpleasant, traumatizing experience she shares in Owner of a Lonely Heart in which she exposes the trauma of being humiliated because of the demeaning stereotypes that fetishize and degrade Asian women; and I dare say this is not unique to Asian women. I am well aware of a similar disrespect toward Latina women, but let’s focus on this specific experience to underscore the reverberations of such an experience.

   When Beth Nguyen was a teenager, she was invited to the theater to watch a musical performance in New York city with her white boyfriend and his step-mother and dad. The name of the performance was Miss Saigon. Beth was not prepared for what she had to deal with. In Miss Saigon a Vietnamese woman falls in love with an American soldier who eventually ditches her for another woman. He married the Vietnamese woman first, and they had a child, but he ends up leaving her to marry another woman in America. In the story the Vietnamese woman was depicted as some sort of sexual, disposable object to satisfy him. When she was no longer convenient for the story, the plot made her commit suicide; the man ends up raising the kid with his respectable new American wife. As a teenager Beth was not able to put into words the humiliation she experienced when she watched the performance. The humiliation led to helpless tears.

   Her reflection on this makes it clear, “Like everyone in America, I had seen plenty of racist Asian stereotypes in movies and shows; mocking accents; jokes about eating dogs. But it was much worse when it was live, right in front of me, the reduction of Vietnamese characters into sexualized women and evil men speaking in broken English.”

 This made me think about the experiences of children and teenagers in America going through similar experiences today when they watch television or movies that do exactly that. They follow a pattern of degrading other human beings due to their background, making false assumptions about who they are, what they think or about how they feel. (I do not watch television, but the few times I did so in the past I noticed the tendency to put people into boxes and to judge them based on their ethnic background).

    One aspect of the book that I did not like is her tendency to refer to “whiteness” as if it were some sort of culture and race. There is no such thing. Whiteness is not a human race; it is not a culture either. It was not her intention, of course, but it is a sort of trap nonetheless to refer to it that way.

  Owner of a Lonely Heart can be an invitation to embrace diversity without holding onto stereotypes and prejudices, but "traps" can emerge anywhere…I appreciate the title of the book: Owner of a Lonely Heart. It encapsulates so much about being an immigrant in the United States of America. 

  In my humble opinion true diversity means giving space to people to be authentic. It means opening ourselves to see others with fresh eyes, irrespective of their background. This can lead to meaningful friendships and interactions. True authenticity leads to new perspectives of understanding, and it may help us to find that we have more in common than we think.

  I highly recommend Beth Nguyen’s book and I will be exploring more of her works.

  Many of the books I read for My Writing Life are from public libraries and little free libraries. Owner of a Lonely Heart, on the other hand, is one I purchased last December from a small independent book store. I will be passing it on by dropping it in a little free library. (You may be the lucky one to find it!)

  Today is World Migratory Bird Day, so celebrate by being aware of the needs of migratory birds. Turn off any unnecessary outdoor lights at night. Leave some clean water for them in case they need it...

 

 Relevant links:

https://www.npr.org/2021/03/19/979336512/for-asian-american-women-misogyny-and-racism-are-inseparable-sociologist-says

https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/las180genderanddevelopmentinlatinamerica/chapter/chloe-gill/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE9MNMBh5k4