is a fantastic adaptation of the podcast it maintains the exact tone and humour that is so iconic to all the McElroy media, and I hope that having it available as a book now will introduce many more people to Sawbones who were perhaps not into the podcast format.
It should be noted, for those who have listened to the podcast, that the book is mostly retellings of topics that have been discussed on the podcast.
This is by no means a bad thing, and of course it's not at all a transcript of the show, but I wouldn't want people to go in expecting entirely new content.
However, if like me you've been listening to the podcast for a while then it may be have been some time since you heard about some of these stories and will enjoy this refresher.
As others have pointed out, the book does suffer from a lack of editing, although I really didn't think the problem was as bad as other reviews suggest most of them were minor typographical errors, although there were a couple of places where part of a sentence seemed to get jumbled up or repeated.
The most obvious error was at the end where, in earlier editions of the book, some erroneous pages were removed and the final pages were glued together, causing a jump in the page numbers.
However, the authors addressed this on social media and on the podcast, where they said this was done to avoid delaying the initial release of the book by reprinting, and that no actual content is missing because of it.
Obviously it's a great shame that these errors made it through to publishing, but overall I don't think it detracts from the quality of the content.
I do have some issues with the layout though the book has a lot of interjects and text boxes, which is fine, but they don't always fit very well and sometimes interrupt the flow of the text.
Also there's some places where the position of the text box clearly wasn't thought out very well because the part of the main text being referenced is actually a few paragraphs later, so it doesn't quite make sense when read in order.
As I said, I don't think these editing and layout issues are detrimental enough to warrant a lower rating, since I still thoroughly enjoyed the book and I can't blame the authors for problems that should have been picked up by an editor.
It's kind of like the grownup version of those gross science books you're supposed to give to preteen and teenage boys when they're growing up because apparently boogers are the only way to introduce them to loving science or whatever.
That being said, I love Justin and Sydnee and I'm proud of them, Fans of the podcast will love this book and people who haven't heard it definitely should look it up, Although this should have been fascinating it was pretty boring, Tons of layout and typo issues didn't help, Really weird that there is no bibliography or sources for any of the contents too, A compelling, often hilarious and occasionally horrifying exploration of how modern medicine came to be!
Wondering whether eating powdered mummies might be just the thing to cure your ills Tempted by those vintage ads suggesting you wear radioactive underpants for virility Ever considered drilling a hole in your head to deal with those pesky headaches Probably not.
But for thousands of years, people have done things like thisand things that make radioactive underpants seem downright sensible! In their hit podcast, Sawbones, Sydnee and Justin McElroy breakdown the weird and wonderful way we got to modern healthcare.
And some of the terrifying detours along the way,
Every week, Dr, Sydnee McElroy and her husband Justin amaze, amuse, and gross out depending on the week hundreds of thousands of avid listeners to their podcast, Sawbones.
Consistently rated a top podcast on iTunes, with overmillion total downloads, this rollicking journey through thousands of years of medical mishaps and miracles is not only hilarious but downright educational.
While you may never even consider applying boiled weasel to your forehead once the height of sophistication when it came to headache cures, you will almost certainly face some questionable medical advice in your everyday life were looking at you, raw water! and be better able to figure out if this is a miracle cure its not or a scam.
Table of Contents:
Part One: The Unnerving
The Resurrection Men
Fun w Galvanism
Weird Weight Loss
Miracle Cure: Opium
Black Plague
Heroes of Misguided Medicine: Pliny the Elder
Erectile Dysfunction
The Doctor Is In: Listener Questions Answered
Dont Drill a Hole in Your Head
Part Two: The Gross
Mummy Medicine
The Guthole Bromance
The Unkillable Phineas Gage
Max Drank Poopy Water
Heroes of Misguided Medicine: Robert Liston
Golden Showers of Health
Miracle CureAll: Radium
Dr.
John Romulus Brinkley
The Doctor Is In QampA
Just Four Humour Me
The Camel Dung Miracle
Part Three: The Weird
The Dancing Plague
Bad Medicine: Tobacco for Health
The SeasickProof Saloon
Miracle CureAll: Vinegar
The Doctor Is In QampA
Heroes of Misguided Medicine
Part Four: The Awesome
The Poison Squad
Bad Medicine: Self Experimentation
Eat Your Chocolate!
Heroes of Misguided Medicine
Parrot Fever
Miracle CureAll: Honey
The Miraculous Polio Vaccine
The Doctor Is In
People's creativity is shown in special medical agony options to deteriorate the state of health.
Please note that I have put the original German text to the end of this review, Just if you might be interested,
In the retrospective, many things are unbelievable and it is difficult to gauge the suffering of the patients, or rather victims.
But how did these questionable approaches devoid of any good clinical practice and scientific method develop What were the causes of so many wrong turns
Many advanced cultures already had welldeveloped and advanced treatments, therapies, hygiene and rudimentary surgery.
With the collapse of the empires, all knowledge was lost and dark ages with massive backlashes befell, The body was portrayed as a sinful, temporary shell and enriched with abstruse fantasy tropes, The disturbed relationship to sexuality, death and bodily functions led to the ban on essential achievements of the past, Medical research had been silenced by the taboo on researching corpses or even examining living people,
The worldview, disturbed by the ideologies of humans, was reflected in medicine in manifold ways, Illness was often not soberly and objectively seen as a natural condition to be treated but as something of cosmic origin.
Be it a punishment, a sign or a reward, Jay, sicknesses of martyrs and saints, what a piece of luck to get infected, I mean chosen by higher entities.
The craving for reputation by the quacks and charlatans fed the superstition of the uneducated population, The "doctors" knew that they always needed a good story that could be adapted to the various faiths mystical, fantastic explanations as a prologue to the spectacular treatment.
This randomly and accidentally caused either more damage than the disease or had no use at all, In exceptional cases, it helped,
The theme is an excellent illustration of what delusion can do, How to use the credulity of people to build institutionalized power complexes, These spread confused heresies into all areas of life, Today, in the Western world, this can only be seen in the form of charlatanry and scientifically proven ineffective healing methods and therapies.
But only a few generations separate the reputable medicine from fits that seem like a mixture of splatter horror and black comedy.
Accordingly, one has to decide as a reader, depending on personality, whether one laughs or is shocked,
Today, the obstacle of modern medicine is the problem of onesidedness, For example, the Human Genome Project, which deducted funding from all other research areas, Furthermore, the research was unilaterally pushed in one direction and paid too little attention to all different approaches and theories.
Ironically, there are now no further results, On the contrary, the underestimated RNA played a much more significant role than expected, Subjectively speaking, one could have come to the conclusion earlier that the source code RNA has something to do with the software DNA.
But whatever. This could be further excavated by other examples from recent history and the future will certainly unveil more bias,
It opens a very likely option, That many of the fundamental doctrines of relevant authorities are partially or wholly wrong which might bring paradigm shifts in some medical disciplines in the future.
Not even to mention psychology and psychiatry, which are much harder to analyze and quantify,
How will our actual healing methods be evaluated in the retrospective These nonindividualized therapies based on pharmacological hammers and sometimes unsafe treatments.
That fallible people cut into other people with sharpened steel, The interdependence of politics and the pharmaceutical industry, And how little we knew about the body and its functional mechanisms, To seek humility in the mistakes of the past would be good to prevent that such erroneous paths are not gone longer than necessary.
Die Kreativität der Menschen schlägt sich in verhaltenskreativen Optionen zur Verschlechtbesserung des Gesundheitszustandes nieder,
In der Retrospektive mutet vieles unglaublich an und man kann das Leid der Patienten, oder eher Opfer, nur schwer ermessen.
Nur, wie kam es zu diesen fragwürdigen Ansätzen, die jeder guten klinischen Praxis und wissenschaftlicher Herangehensweise entbehrten Was waren die Ursachen so vieler Irrwege
Viele Hochkulturen hatten bereits gut entwickelte und weit fortgeschrittene Behandlungen, Therapien, Hygiene und Chirurgie.
Mit dem Kollaps der Reiche ging all das Wissen verloren und dunkle Zeitalter mit massiven Backlashs brachen herein, Der Körper wurde als sündige, vorübergehende Hülle dargestellt und mit abstrusen Fantasytropes angereichert, Das gestörte Verhältnis zu Sexualität, Tod und Körperfunktionen führte zum Verbot sinnvoller Errungenschaften der Vergangenheit.
Die medizinische Forschung wurde durch das Tabu, an Leichen oder selbst an lebenden Menschen zu forschen, still gelegt,
Das durch die Ideologien der Menschen gestörte Weltbild schlug sich in vielfältiger Weise auf die Medizin nieder.
Krankheit wurde häufig nicht nüchtern und objektiv als ein zu natürliches, zu behandelndes Leiden gesehen, sondern als etwas von kosmischen Ursprung.
Sei es als Strafe, Zeichen oder Belohnung,
Die Profilierungssucht der Quacksalber nährte den Aberglauben der ungebildeten Bevölkerung, Die "Ärzte" wussten, dass sie immer eine gute Geschichte, die sich für die verschiedenen Glaubensgebäude adaptieren ließ, brauchten.
Mystische, fantastische Erklärungen als Prolog für die spektakuläre Behandlung, Diese richtete rein zufällig entweder mehr Schaden an als die Krankheit oder nutzte nichts, In Ausnahmefällen half es,
Die Thematik ist eine schöne Veranschaulichung, was Verblendung anrichten kann, Wie sich die Leichtgläubigkeit der Menschen ausnutzen lässt, um institutionalisierte Machtkomplexe zu errichten, Diese verbreiten wirre Irrlehren in alle Bereiche des Lebens hinein, Heute sieht man das, in der westlichen Welt, nur noch in Form von Scharlatanerie und wissenschaftlich erwiesen wirkungslosen Heilverfahren und Therapien.
Doch nur eine Zeitspanne von ein paar Generationen trennt die seriöse Medizin von Anwandlungen, die wie eine Mischung aus Splatter Horror und schwarzer Komödie anmuten.
Entsprechend muss man als Leser entscheiden ob man je nach Naturell lachen oder mit aufgerissenen Augen schockiert sein soll, Ich lachte mit weit aufgerissenen Augen,
Heute liegt der Hemmschuh der modernen Medizin in dem Problem der Einseitigkeit, Etwa das Human Genom Projekt, dass von allen andere Forschungsrichtungen die Fördermittel abzog, Weiters wurde die Forschung einseitig in eine Richtung gedrängt und alle anderen Ansätze und Theorien viel zu wenig Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt.
Ironischerweise kommt man jetzt zu keinen weiteren Ergebnissen, Im Gegenteil, die unterschätzte RNA spielte eine viel größere Rolle als angenommen, Subjektiv gesagt, hätte man zwar früher darauf kommen können, dass der Quellcode RNA etwas mit der Software DNA zu tun haben können.
Aber whatever. Dazu könnte man noch weitere Beispiele aus jüngerer Vergangenheit ausgraben und die Zukunft wird noch genug ans Tageslicht fördern.
Es eröffnet eine sehr wahrscheinliche Option, Dass viele der als unantastbare Lehrmeinung von wichtigen Autoritäten geltende Ansätze teilweise oder ganz falsch sind, Was in einigen medizinischen Disziplinen in Zukunft Paradigmenwechsel mit sich bringen dürfte, Von Psychologie und Psychiatrie, die sich noch viel schwerer analysieren und quantifizieren lassen, ganz zu schweigen,
Wie man unsere Heilmethoden in der Retrospektive betrachten wird Diese nicht individualisierte, auf pharmakologische Hämmer und mitunter unsicheren Therapien fußenden Verfahren.
Dass fehlbare Menschen mit Stahl in andere Menschen schnitten, Die Verflechtungen von Politik und Pharmaindustrie, Und wie wenig wir über den Körper und seine Funktionsmechanismen wussten, In den Fehlern der Vergangenheit Demut zu suchen wäre gut, um derartige Irrwege nicht länger als notwendig beschreiten zu müssen.
Love the podcast and love the book! Super happy to have received this for Christmas :
Highly recommend! This is my favorite podcast, so I was excited to get my hands on this book.
Unfortunately it fell a little flat, First, if you listen to the podcast or enjoy medical history this book is not going to add to you knowledge.
That isnt a negative. Just be aware that its more of an introduction to the subject than an immersion into it, Second, the podcast is hilarious the book not so much, The dynamic the two authors have verbally doesnt translate well into the written word, Ive experienced the same when reading other books by stand up comedians, Lastly, the book needed better editing, I found multiple typos and grammatical errors, This is what bothered me the most as its a pet peeve of mine,
I still gave itas I did enjoy the subject matter, and I thought the page layouts were beautiful.
The illustrator did a great job! I think this would be a great gift for someone who doesnt listen to the podcast but has an interest in the medical field.
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Review The Sawbones Book: The Hilarious, Horrifying Road To Modern Medicine Authored By Justin McElroy Format Printed Matter
Justin McElroy