Nobody warns you when you start medical school that your career decisions have only just begun. Up to a decade of recruitment pitches follow: have you thought about becoming a haematologist? Leave the ward for the drama of theatre! If you don’t like patients, try radiology. A recent flush of popular medical non-fiction lets the public sample this professional pressure. From the heart to the gut, each author claims his or her chosen organ has been unfairly overlooked.
The genre’s most recent additions are about skin and bone. Dermatologists and orthopods are often sidelined as medicine’s aestheticians and carpenters, responsible for the paintwork and scaffolding that encase and buttress the vital organs. The Secret Life of Bones and The Remarkable Life of the Skin set the record straight.
Brian Switek, a science writer and paleontologist, opens his story 530 million years ago with our aquatic ancestor, the pikaia, an extinct eel-like creature, just an inch long, which had the whisperings of a spine.
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