Welcome to Litsy!

Mary Roach has a particular brand of science writing that is very entertaining while being educational. This one was all about prosthetics and other aspects of replicating human body parts. The author also gets into the ethics and cultural significance of this, especially with animal-grown parts. Roach traveled the world to research this topic—most memorable for me was the pig farm in China which produces body parts as China has few organ donors.

Stiff will always be my favorite because it was my first Roach. This one was not bad. I sometimes get annoyed that she doesn‘t go more in depth on the particular topics I find the most interesting 🤷🏻‍♀️. I like my science with a sense of humor.

“I try to suggest not going that far,” Daza-Flores says. He tries to get inside their heads, to see why they‘re asking for this. Is it something their partner wants? He counsels patients against getting implants to please someone else. Because, as he puts it, the surgeries often outlast the relationships. He has had patients who‘ve “changed out their breast implants every time they change boyfriends.”

This is my second Mary Roach book, and I just don't think she's for me. I almost felt like her writing is overly familiar; like I'm expected to understand her personality and drive and humor right out the gate. Therefore, I never really get to know her, and it is hard to connect to her voice in the book. There also didn't seem to be a purpose to her choices of topics other than her whims or whomever would talk with her, unless that's just the ARC.

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: