A "Conversation" With The Body's Internal Organs

During the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, I thought about writing an article that would be an "interview" with the virus. But I abandoned the idea because I felt with all the hysteria going on at the time, people would think I was making light of a serious health issue.

Eric Spitznagel, a writer and AARP newsletter editor, proves that such a health-related article can be done, using a light touch. His article, "The Inside Story of Your  Body...The Major Players Keeping You Alive Have Their Say" (AARP The Magazine, August/September 2023), is informative, humorous, and entertaining. And it does all three without being frivolous. For example, when Spitznagel asks the liver about liver spots, the organ responds, "Nah, that's a myth. Those spots are actually just skin blemishes caused by sun damage. Nothing to do with me!"

In a "conversation" with such organs as the stomach, the kidneys, the intestines, and the liver, we learn how each organ functions and what can be done to maintain their health, or as Spitznagel puts it, "extend their shelf life."

Each "conversation" with an internal organ has a humorous title and illustration. Three examples: the section about the kidneys and bladder is titled "This Way Out," the section regarding the intestines  is called "The Evacuation Team,"  and the stomach section is called "The Blender in Your Belly."

The article is more fun to read than "I am Joe's Kidney" in Reader's Digest. And the information provided has more staying power in the mind because of how it's presented to the reader.

I hope the magazine publishes more health articles like it.

Learning About The Human Eye Via A Grammar Textbook

Recently, while browsing through an old English grammar textbook, published in 1958, and designed for ninth-grade students, I learned something very interesting about the human eye--that we actually see the world upside down.

In a ten-sentence sample essay about how the eye sees objects, sentence seven begins, "Do you know that pictures of things around you enter the eye upside down?" The next sentence explains that "Your brain reverses the images for you." I never knew that.

To verify the accuracy of that bit of information, I asked my ophthalmologist about this and he confirmed it. So it is possible to learn something about biology even from an old grammar textbook. And what I learned underscores how amazing an organ the brain is.