Of all the objects in the world, the human body has a peculiar status. It is not only possessed by the person who has it, it also possesses and constitutes him. Without a body, it would be difficult to claim sensations and experiences as our own. Who or what would be having them, and where would they be happening?
This brilliant, original overview of the development of modern biology and modern medicine, based on the dramatic thirteen-part BBC television series, is the exciting story of how man found out about his own body and how it works. It is Dr. Miller's contention that the unprecedented advances in medicine in recent years are the result not of the rapid increase in heroic procedures and the discovery of "miracle" drugs, but of a newly accurate understanding of what a healthy body is and how it survives and protects itself. Because we have learned what nature is, we can now reproduce and reconstitute some of her grand designs when they are damaged or destroyed.
How did this come about? How, for example, did we first discover that we had an organ called the heart -- which is not manifest on the surface -- and, having discovered it, determine the role it plays in sustaining life? Since finding out what something is, is largely a matter of finding out what it is like, man's technological inventions have been of the greatest assistance to him in teaching him about himself. In the case of the heart, the ancients likened it to a fire or a lamp, since it seemed to animate the whole body, and the secret of the circulatory system remained undiscovered. In the seventeenth century, William Harvey saw a fire pump in action and suddenly realized that the heart worked on the same principle. Until the invention of automatic gun turrets in World War II, there was no model to explain voluntary muscular movement. Once man had designed servomechanisms, which automatically control heat, open and close doors, and so on, it was easy to see that the body is made up of systems of these which protect it against illness or injury without any conscious control on the part of the owner.
Dr. Mliler traces such discoveries from the beginning of the Renaissance to the present, showing how medical developments are related to events in politics and trends in culture as well as to industry and craftsmanship. Writing with wit, eloquence, remarkable clarity, and an infectious enthusiasm for his subject, he has produced a major work about that most mysterious object, the human body, and the curious relationship it has had with the human mind.