Reading Level: Average. Very accessible.
213 pages.
Reisman was born in 1981 in Englewood, New Jersey. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from New York University in 2001.[5] After graduating, he worked and lived in Saint Petersburg, Russia as an intern with the Centre for Independent Social Research. He traveled throughout the country researching and writing about the Russian timber industry, nuclear pollution, and the international environmental movement.[6] He also spent five months on the Kamchatka Peninsula studying the culture and subsistence practices of the region’s indigenous peoples. After returning from Russia, Reisman earned his Doctor of Medicine from Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in 2010.[8] He completed a combined residency training in internal medicine and pediatrics at Harvard, at Massachusetts General Hospital, in 2014. The first part of his medical career was devoted to emergency medicine in a variety of posts around the country. His residencies took him to some far-away places including Antarctica and the Himalayas where he studied wilderness and high-altitude medicine. He then studied neonatal resuscitation in India and Tanzania and infectious diseases among the Yupik of Alaska. Reisman’s writing combines his interest in human anatomy and the practice of medicine with interests in the natural world, human culture, travel, food and prehistoric crafts. His first book, The Unseen Body, has been translated into six languages.
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Our everyday body experience, and actually our lifetime body experience, is grounded in mystery. There are many parts of the body that we will never see—or feel—during our lifetimes except in cases of MRI scans. The truth is that much of the body is unseen by us or others except for medical technicians when there are physical malfunctions.
The book is divided into 15 chapters, most compelling, some rather scattershot, with a narrative woven of human anatomy, his wide travels, and the nature of various organ systems. If you enjoyed biology class in high school or college, then this is the book for you.
Reisman’s insights into disease and the nature of the medical profession allow him to conclude that “A physician’s task in treating disease is to alleviate blockages and allow fluids to resume their proper motion. In other words, most of the practice of medicine is plumbing.” Doctors spend much of their day dealing with a leak or “a clog stopping up the flow of some fluid sloshing through the body’s corporeal pipes.” I felt some personal gratification from these statements as I have said for years that the secret to longevity is to keep things moving. Thank you for the validation, Dr. Reisman.
The key to understanding Reisman and his thinking is found in his many globe-trotting adventures. A trip to the Alaskan Arctic shows that fat is not the enemy, but the hero of the human body and survival. His visit to Nepal uncovered the demarcation where the brain ends and the mind begins. And one meal of a sheep’s head in Iceland gave him a lesson in empathy.
Of greatest interest is how Reisman comes to the conclusion that the greatest skill a physician can have is not technical but communicative through eye contact with the patient and before any verbal or laptop interaction occurs. The Unseen Body is an unusual and entertaining book as is its author.
Closing Thoughts
Reisman offers a very different perspective in guiding us in making sense of the unknown parts of our bodies in ways never before imagined. Books written by doctors about their jobs are interesting, but Reisman takes things to a different level. This book unfolds like a travel adventure and is extremely creative its observations about the body and its functioning.
I liked this book because Reisman is, in his own right, a heavy-hitter of a physician and world traveler, with a breezy, cozy writing style that draws the reader in after a few sentences. He possesses fascinating mind that makes meaning from a variety of seemingly unconnected items and manages to wrap it all up into a meaningful whole. He does this by starting with a wide variety of insights about the places he has traveled to and connects them to various organ systems of the body. For example, he shows us how understanding the structure of mountain watersheds helps to diagnose heart attacks. He notes how the body is made mostly of mucus, not water, and the implications of our viscous existence. And how urine tells the tale of the origin of human life on this planet.
I also liked it that he is a medical doctor and journalist as my own undergraduate degree was in journalism.
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
References
Reisman, J. (2021). The Unseen Body: A Doctor’s Journey Through the Hidden Wonders of Human Anatomy. New York, NY: Flatiron Books.