We had already been pleasantly surprised by reading The periodic table, of Hugh Aldersey-Williams, that we reviewed here a while ago, and which became one of the best chemistry popular books we had read, so now it was time to dive into another book by the same author, Anatomies, dedicated to the human body and each of its most intimate parts.
Definitely, Hugh Aldersey-Williams is one of the writers who best manages the marriage between science and literature, like a contemporary, totally alphanumeric Renaissance man.
The human body
As if he were one of the characters from the 1966 movie amazing trip, the author seems to miniaturize himself to travel inside a man's body with the purpose of revealing each of the details. Also reflecting how science has been advancing, taking possession of those newly discovered lands, dividing them into parts, proclaiming sovereignty over them in the name of new specialized disciplines.
![[Libros que nos inspiran] 'La tabla periódica' de Hugh Aldersey-Williams](https://i.blogs.es/874816/9788434405974/375_142.jpg)
And all of this intersected with the influence that each of those parts of the body has produced in art, literature, society, prejudices, politics, everything. Just because, The resolution of the human eye is approximately two tenths of a millimeter, which is approximately the diameter of the point that ends this sentence. But the eye was also one of the academic obsessions of the French philosopher Rene Descartes, of which we all know its Cogito ergo sum, but few know that he also wrote an essay titled The Diopter (The dioptric).
An x-ray that has been taken under the Renaissance prism on 650 muscles and 206 bones, 3 million hairs, 200,000 kilometers of veins, 440,000 million cells, a heart that beats 75 times per minute. 4,500 times per hour. 108,000 times a day. 2.8 billion times in a lifetime.
Anatomies: The human body, its parts and the stories they tell (Ariel)
That's how immense, and much more, the human body is. And thanks to the compass-like pen of Aldersey-Williams, We will know how to orient ourselves better than ever in this new geography..
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The news
Books that inspire us: 'Anatomies' by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.