Welcome to Litsy!

My dad had a mild case of polio as a kid (and was forever bothered that his school burned his desk and pencil box), so this story of polio in the US, from infections to vaccines, was fascinating to me. But frankly, I would have enjoyed it even without that connection. The writing is engaging and I just wanted to keep listening.

Not my favorite Mary Roach but that‘s because I‘m more interested (for better or worse) in topics like the afterlife, wildlife, & outer space than I am in care of the human body while we‘re alive. Wise? No! Yet true.

Still fascinating (though it made me grimace a few times & I‘ve got a pretty strong stomach).

I remain convinced that Mary Roach is THE coolest person. I hope she gets a personal pig so she can live & write for a very long time. 🐷

Come covers quite a bit in this, mostly the history of women in medicine, what "They" thought of us, how the medical institutions reflected the morals of the time, no matter what the evidence showed.
I wish she would have included Trans women more, she mostly ignores them beyond using a quote from Dylan Mulvaney and a few off handed sentencing at the end of a long chapter on HRT.
But overall I thought this was good she makes interesting points?

Listening to this audiobook while walking the neighborhood.
Look at this tree!! So red, so gorgeous 😍

Are you curious about replacement organs and transplants? Body science? Medical history? Mary Roach approaches all of this with her usual humor in this new release. I learned quite a bit as always.

“People don‘t realize how dangerous anesthesia can be, said Jordan Newmark, who is the anesthesiologist I met. “I‘ve been saying for years, they should make a movie like Top Gun but about anesthesiology,” he said when we first spoke. At the time, this confused me. It was as though Jordan had access to some bizarro elevator-pitch app that randomly combined hit movies with medical specialties. Like Gladiator, but about urology. He was insistent:

“Stoodley doesn‘t dwell on it. “There are two kinds of micro-biologists,” he said. “There are the ones who say, “Bacteria are everywhere! We‘ve got to sterilize everything!” His wife is one of those. “Then there‘s the ones who say, “Bacteria are everywhere! And yet we‘ve survived! “ That‘s Stoody. “I‘m very cavalier,” he said. I am too, though a little less so now. One thing I‘m funny about is drinking from Mason jars. You just know there‘s mouth-

#2025Book45

“Certain surgeons kind of like thump their chest that they made such a big one,” Garcia is saying. He takes a last swallow of Chianti. “It‘s so stupid.” (In fairness to surgeons, trans men fairly commonly, Garcia says, request a neophallus larger than the average natal penis. But the extreme cases seem to have been the surgeons doing.) “

“I find equally remarkable the inventiveness and confidence of surgeons who dream up operations like this one. Who looks at the human digestive tract and thinks, moist, tubular, stretchy…Might that make a reasonable vagina?”