How your Body Works

Far from an exhaustive text, this is an entertaining large (250x330mm) format collection of picturesque bits of anatomy and physiology. So we learn how muscles oppose each other, how vein-valves work, that Queen Alexandra used an electric hearing aid and that we wake up taller than we went to bed. Adding value to every spread is a time chart of medical history running along the bottom of each page. Starting with trepanning for headaches in 10,000 B.C., it ends with genetic research in the present decade. This provides a very good picture of the jerky and patchy development of medical knowledge, so more's the pity that the sequence has got jumbled in the early 20th century and that nothing - not even McIndoe's plastic surgery - seems to have happened between 1929 and 1950. With an arbitrary seeming selection and arrangement of contents, this is first and foremost a browsing book - indeed it's hard to imagine it rewarding any other approach - but as such it's a pleasant one and may well lead the right reader onto more substantial fare.