Gavin Francis

“It is said to be one of our oldest stories, embedded in humanity’s DNA, when a young man goes to a far-off land in search of a terrible or wondrous beast. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Beowulf – they all fit the template. Bruce Chatwin added his Patagonian journey to the list. For years the idea of Antarctica had murmured in my ambition; a desire to go to the remotest land on our planet, to see one of the most wondrous beasts alive.”

Memoir of the author’s show more year-long stay in Antarctica as part of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) research station at Halley, serving as the resident doctor. He had a strong desire to experience the type of solitude available in one of the most remote regions of the globe. He takes the opportunity to observe a nearby rookery for Emperor Penguins. The book is organized around the seasons. It is filled with reflections on his stay at Halley, along with observations about early expeditions, such as those of Scott and Shackleton.

Dr. Francis had time on his hands to observe the penguins, ski around the base, do plenty of chores and lots of reading. He gives us a good idea of what life was like on the base. The author’s lively and vivid style helps bring the stark beauty of this remote continent to life in the mind’s eye. I enjoy reading about adventures in places I will never personally experience. I very much enjoyed this combination of science, history, memoir, and meditation on solitude.

“It is April, soon after the autumnal equinox, and the refreezing of the sea is already well advanced. Emperor penguins are returning from a summer fishing, fat and gleaming, to mate on the new sea ice close to the edges of the continent. They are the only species evolved to survive these coasts through the winter. That they breed through it, carrying eggs on their feet as they shuffle through the darkness, is one of the wonders of the natural world.” show less

“no one is immortal, nothing is eternal, everything is in flux . . .”

In this fascinating book, medicine and culture intersect. Gavin Francis takes as his theme the many and various changes that the human body can undergo in the course of a lifetime. An Edinburgh GP, Francis draws on twenty years of clinical experience with patients and sometimes on interviews with other clinicians or people with unusual conditions to explore alterations in the body. Changes dictated by the natural human show more lifecycle; transformations that are the result of faulty genetics, disease, or trauma; and, some “improvements” that are cosmetic or elective—all make their appearance in this book.

Francis uses informal patient histories as springboards for wide-ranging reflection on myths, history, religion, philosophy, and the arts. The literature of antiquity figures prominently, but there are also references to modern works by Kafka, Atwood, Eugenides, and others. As one might expect in a book focused on the body in flux, puberty, pregnancy, anorexia, and hermaphroditism are covered; however, there are also unanticipated excursions into lycanthropy (which refers both to the transformation of a person into a werewolf and a form of madness characterized by the delusion that one is an animal), anabolic steroid use (and its less commonly known effects on personality and mood), and the changes a newborn’s heart usually undergoes (and sometimes doesn’t) when the infant takes her first breaths of air.

Francis serves up a veritable feast of information about anatomy, physiological processes, and cultural material related to the body—some of it quite esoteric and arcane. His book can be demanding at times if you, like me, are not as scientifically literate as you’d like to be. I found reading the book on an electronic device to be advantageous when it came to visualizing—comprehending—some of the topics under discussion. It was useful, for example, to look at a diagram of the “double spiral of opposing helical fibres” in the middle layer of the ductus arteriosus—an important blood vessel in the fetus which allows blood to bypass developing lungs. The drawing helped me to understand how this channel for blood usually closes when a newborn begins to breathe. Francis does provide some useful photographs in the book, but I wouldn’t have minded a helpful diagram or two as well.

Shapeshifters is an unusual and captivating work of nonfiction that put me in mind of the works of the great American anatomist/pathologist-writer F. Gonzalez-Crussi. It is not an easy read, but it is a rich and rewarding one—one of those rare books that merits a second reading.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a digital copy of the book for review purposes. Thanks to Gavin Francis for writing it. show less

A book with a bridge theme but becomes part memoir, part travel writing, part political analysis and part history and geography as the reader visits bridges around the world. Gavin Francis has sorted the bridges by the decade he visited them, as a child in the 1980s as a young man in the 1990s and so on. He tells engaging stories around the bridges, some of them personal and other stories shared with him. It was most interesting when he was writing about a bridge that I know but I also show more learnt about bridge design and building and how they are used. He references the Brexit referendum at many points and considers the bridge building across Europe in this context. It is a book you can dip in and out of. show less

Somehow I've had a bit of a run on medical non-fiction books this quarter (all of which have been hugely interesting, even to someone who could only manage a C in GCSE Biology).

Adventures in Human Being is written by a British GP who takes us on an interesting jaunt through the human body from tip to toe. Francis has an interesting approach of mixing modern medical knowledge with occasional forays into medical practices and superstitions from the past or from other geographies (such as how show more different cultures over the ages have treated afterbirth).

For most of the body parts he tells us about a particular case he dealt with affecting that body part - some are funny, whilst other are sad realities of common deaths (such as the elderly lady who dies after breaking her hip in a fall). Some others are a hypochondriac's nightmare (the young gardener who ends up in intensive care after pricking her finger on a rose bush).

This was a book nicely handled for the non-scientific reader - chapters just the right length, and a nice mix of the clinical and the emotional impact of those clinical diagnoses on the affected patients.

4 stars - I wonder if I could scrape to a B now in that GCSE.... show less