This is by no means a jolly read - with vivid stories, Liz Kalaugher takes us into the world of zoonotic diseases, both where humans are infected by largely wild animal diseases and where we spread disease among other species. The book voyages around the world and into the prehistoric past (entertainingly in a chapter that begins at Bristol bus station, the way all prehistory stories probably should), suggesting that perhaps the Neanderthals were wiped out by a lack of disease resistance. Kalaugher takes us on a genuinely engaging voyage of discovery, taking in a diverse range of fauna from honeycreepers and Tasmanian devils to ferrets, frogs and foxes. If, like me, you are distinctly averse to reading about anything medical, the thought of encountering avian pox, plague, West Nile virus and more can be a little unnerving, but on the whole the stories are more about the animals and their environment than too much medical detail. Probably the weakest part of the book, as is often the ca...

When I started to read this book I wasn't aware of the significance of the second part of the tag line. I assumed it was a book about the science of the much-underrated sense of smell - and part of it is - but the main theme is that 'how its loss can change your world' part. Paola Totaro lost her sense of smell early in the Covid pandemic, and this would have a big impact on her life, driving forward the urge to find out more about changes that can occur to the sense of smell.  Loss or modification of the ability to detect odours is more common than we tend to think, but has largely been ignored by the medical profession, in part because we tend to under-rate the importance of the ability to detect odours. Totaro covers both the total loss of detection and also the, arguably more devastating, situation where substances as innocuous as water, along with many foods, can start to smell disgusting - another common impact of Covid. I'm not a great fan of 'me-centred'...

As Jules Howard acknowledges, there have been plenty of books about what makes a dog tick, whether they are training manuals, evolutionary examinations such as The Wolf Within or ethological studies of humans' closest animal partner such as If Dogs Could Talk . But most of Jules Howard's Wonderdog takes us into the roles that dogs have played in advancing science. Some of this material is fairly gruesome. We discover, for example, dogs' importance to medical research, particularly at a time when experimenting on animals had few ethical limits. What makes the book enjoyable is the way the Howard ties in his history with engaging stories - such as the brown dog statue, put up in Battersea in 1907 as a memorial to a dog horribly misused by vivisectionists, only for the statue to be destroyed by the council to bring an end to frequent attacks by infuriated medical students. (The statue has since been replaced.) Similarly, dogs have proved valuable in widening our understandin...

This is a real 'neither fish nor fowl' book. On the one hand it is trying to look edgy with that presumably Sex Pistols inspired title and chapter headings like 'What makes you think you are in control of your life?' and 'Why aren't you in jail?' - but on the other hand the text is clearly written by an academic, being somewhat over-heavy on giving us facts with limited narrative and a stodgy writing style to accompany it. The confusion begins with the very first lines of the book. We are told at the start of the introduction 'The title captures exactly what this book is about' - but actually the title tells the reader nothing about what this book is about. The subtitle helps more. It's 'A scientist's guide to the biggest challenges facing our species today' - and to make sure we know this is a real scientist writing it, the author's name is given as 'Professor Luke O'Neill.' A more accurate subtitle might have said ...

Many people don't realise how recently medicine has come to be scientific. This didn't really occur comprehensively with most areas of medicine until the second half of the twentieth century. The area that has arguably lagged far behind the rest is mental health, where outdated Victorian ideas (such as those of Freud) with no scientific basis have clung on, as if we still resorted to bleeding people to make them better. Although the book centres on memory, Veronica O'Keane shows impressively how the increasing awareness of the impossibility of divorcing aspects of the mind from the physical aspects of the brain make it necessary to have a very different understanding of mental health issues. Often an understanding of physical problems with the brain have been developed from medical cases, and O'Keane takes us effectively and interestingly through some of these cases and the functions of the different parts of the brain relevant to memory and how problems with them can i...

I heard recently that the local geriatric ward puts a photograph of the patient in his or her prime by each bed. The aim is to help staff to treat their patients as individuals, but it makes me uneasy. Do these people only matter because of what they were, not what they are? Because once they stood proud and handsome in their uniform, or looked lovely on their wedding day? Professor Atul Gawande has the problem surgically excised and laid out for inspection in one of his unflinching but compassionate case studies: ‘What bothered Shelley was how little curiosity the staff members seemed to have about what Lou cared about in his life and what he had been forced to forfeit... They might have called the service they provided assisted living, but no-one seemed to think it was their job to actually assist him with living – to figure out how to sustain the connection and joys that most mattered to him.’ Gawande is an eminent surgeon. As a young resident he displayed little overt emoti...

The story of radium's rise and fall as a glamorous substance for everything from health and beauty to glow-in-the-dark watch dials is a fascinating one, and Lucy Jane Santos explores it with clear enthusiasm for the topic. Although radium is the main theme, there are a number of X-ray based stories woven in through the book, plus a relatively small amount of non-radium radioactivity coverage, including a rapid run through the development of nuclear weapons. But it is radium that is the star. Inevitably Marie Curie (or Marie Sklodowska Curie as Santos usually refers to her), plays a significant part, although we don't get a huge amount of detail of Curie's biography (though this has been covered in many other books), primarily focusing on her work on radium and X-rays. We then see radium being taken up by both the medical profession and by quack producers of patent medicines with equal verve as a near-magic cure-all for everything from arthritis to cancer. What comes t...

This book was written before the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, though it has been updated to include it: it's certainly not any kind of attempt to cash in, but rather a sober reflection on how outbreaks and epidemics work, what process the world has in place to deal with them and how a changing, globalised world has magnified risk. If I'm honest, I'm not a great fan of medical books, but Meera Senthilingam gives an important introduction to disease outbreaks and epidemics, giving enough detail to make sense of them without ever being too technical for the general reader. This is careful journalism, which can sometimes come across as rather dry, but that's not necessarily a bad thing given the topic. The book starts by plunging us into the beginnings of the 2003 SARS epidemic, then brings in COVID-19 (as of, by the look of it, around the start of March 2020) and measles before plunging back to smallpox and the origins of vaccination. There is a strong section ...

I have to say straight away that my four star rating comes with a proviso. I loved this book. And if you, too, are fascinated by the history of British science and are interested in Cambridge University, you will too. What we have here is a history of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (remarkably generously published by Oxford University Press, given it chronicles Cambridge's rise to be a superior science university) - a society that proved surprisingly influential in the rise in the study of science, and physics in particular, at the University of Cambridge. Don't be surprised if you have never heard of the Cambridge Philosophical Society - I hadn't, and I studied natural sciences at Cambridge. (That's 'philosophical' in the sense of natural philosophy - i.e. science - not the wooly stuff, by the way.) The reason it is relatively unknown, I suspect, is that unlike the other philosophical societies and 'lit and phils' that sprang up around the U...