Mustn't Grumble

 

Mustn’t Grumble by Graham Lawton (2021 Headline Home hardcover 342pp)

 

Subtitled “The surprising science of everyday ailments and why we’re always a bit ill” this book pretty much lives up to the description with a few catches.

Graham Lawton is a staff writer for the venerable New Scientist magazine and holds degrees in both Biochemistry and Science Communication. As a result, the content isn’t million miles from what you’d find in a popular science journal. The book is divided into six sections each pertaining to a particular part of the body or type of illness – e.g.: ‘Ears, Nose & Throat’, “Bad Guts” and so on. In each of these categories he’s written quite short bite-sized magazine-style items on particular ailments, around one hundred of them in total. He shies away from more serious, potentially fatal maladies and often tells the reader to seek professional help if they think something more serious is going on.

Lawton’s writing is light and humorous, often using anecdotes about his own life or those of his friends and family to illustrate a point. On the downside his understanding of many of the topics seems slight and superficial. I was hoping he’d interview the scientists working in these areas and tell us what the latest research has uncovered. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of that going in in these pages. Of course, many of the conditions he writes about are still semi-mysterious, the exact reason why we suffer from many of them remain unknown and only guessed at by medical science.

I read this book over a few days and found it a little overwhelming with sameness and repetition, probably better to dip in and out of over a longer period of time. Some of it is not for the squeamish, plenty of descriptions that will make you cringe whether you’ve experienced them yourself or not.

So, one for the popular science fan or hypochondriac among you. Nothing too heavy and quite entertaining in a way.