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Reviews tagging 'Medical content'
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee
7 reviews
mbrogs2024's review against another edition
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Cancer, Chronic illness, Death, Mental illness, Suicidal thoughts, Terminal illness, Blood, Medical content, Grief, and Pandemic/Epidemic
Minor: Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Infertility, Antisemitism, Pregnancy, War, and Injury/Injury detail
angorarabbit's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
sad
slow-paced
4.0
TLDR: You need some background in life sciences. If you put the time it needs you will learn a lot.
Context: I read The Emperor of All Maladies a while ago and was left unsatisfied. After reading this book I believe that I did not spend the time or brain power that book needed for me to understand it. I may also have been hindered by false expectations that the book would tell me that cancer is cured. Cancer sucks.
I really regret my poor education in life sciences right now. Fortunately I was reading this as a Libby library book on the Kindle app which made looking up definitions so much easier. Even though I was way above my education level with this book I do feel I have a better understanding of how the cells of my body work. A post-secondary class in a non Evangelical environment would have helped.
I am blinded with science. So much complexity. So much has to work exactly right every time. All those cells singing all those metaphorical songs so my brain can fire and I can attempt to understand the digital print in front of me.
Professor Mukherjee breaks up the medical content with stories of patients and scientists and starts chapters with a verse of poetry or a quote (hIs poetry selections are worth looking up to read the entire poem). This helped break up a very dense book. I had trouble with concentration, sometimes needing to reread a paragraph as my mind would wander. The patient stories also helped me understand real life consequences .
Professor Mukherhjee names the female scientists and scientists from continents other than Europe and North America who often don’t get named in US nonfiction science books. He also takes the time to acknowledge that women did not get named as authors in scientific papers until the last few decades even though they may have done much of the lab work. He also used she/her when speaking about scientists in general. I appreciated this as all too often it seems that no one like me is mentioned in this type of book except as breast and cervical cancer patients..
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Chronic illness, Infertility, Blood, Medical content, and Pandemic/Epidemic
Moderate: Animal death, Child death, Death, Gore, Mental illness, Suicide, Terminal illness, and Death of parent
Covid 19, medial experiments on animals, Nazi human experiments, depression.podanotherjessi's review
hopeful
informative
slow-paced
This book had a lot of elements that I understand, but that annoyed me nonetheless.
First, Mukherjee does a remarkable job through most of this book of explaining complex biological topics in ways most people will understand. This is really good, and I commend him for it. That said, he fails to do this at points in the book, largely in the introduction. I have a biology background, and even I found myself lost with the jargon he was throwing around at the beginning of the book.
But on the other hand, the first 20, maybe 30 percent of the book is dedicated to explaining what a cell is and where it comes from. And this section to me felt too rudimentary. It was information, in my experience, that anyone with a high school level science education would already know. I understand needing to include this as background because if you didn't understand those things, much of the rest of the book would have been incomprehensible. But I think it could have been condensed to keep things moving.
Second, almost all of the modern examples are pulled from Mukherjee's personal experience. If the case studies weren't of people he treated himself, they were close friends of his, or someone treated by a doctor he went to med school with or did a post-doc with. And if they somehow didn't fit those, it was someone he had met, and he used an anecdote about that meeting as a jumping off point to talk about their condition.
This is likely a practical issue of patient confidentiality, but it came off as slightly braggadocios. It read, to me, as if Mukherjee was using these examples to show off his brilliance. I'm positive that was not his intent, but it was the feeling I was left with anyway.
Third, I wish that so much of this book hadn't been focused on cancer specifically. In retrospect, that was the topic Mukherjee was clearly most interested in exploring, and that's alright. I just wish it had been clear earlier. I wanted to hear about other things - and there are other diseases that are briefly touched on, but none so much as cancer. Covid, the part I was perhaps most curious about, was given barely any attention, having the shortest section.
But there's a lot to really recommend this book. I loved the historic background whenever that was the focus. As I said, Mukherjee does a remarkable job making the material accessible. So I do think anyone interested in cellular biology and how medicine is advancing (specifically as it pertains to cancer), I would recommend picking this up! But not the audiobook. The narrator's pronunciations in parts were really rough. Especially when it came to words in other languages. I never want to hear Boutsikaris try to say anything in German ever again.
First, Mukherjee does a remarkable job through most of this book of explaining complex biological topics in ways most people will understand. This is really good, and I commend him for it. That said, he fails to do this at points in the book, largely in the introduction. I have a biology background, and even I found myself lost with the jargon he was throwing around at the beginning of the book.
But on the other hand, the first 20, maybe 30 percent of the book is dedicated to explaining what a cell is and where it comes from. And this section to me felt too rudimentary. It was information, in my experience, that anyone with a high school level science education would already know. I understand needing to include this as background because if you didn't understand those things, much of the rest of the book would have been incomprehensible. But I think it could have been condensed to keep things moving.
Second, almost all of the modern examples are pulled from Mukherjee's personal experience. If the case studies weren't of people he treated himself, they were close friends of his, or someone treated by a doctor he went to med school with or did a post-doc with. And if they somehow didn't fit those, it was someone he had met, and he used an anecdote about that meeting as a jumping off point to talk about their condition.
This is likely a practical issue of patient confidentiality, but it came off as slightly braggadocios. It read, to me, as if Mukherjee was using these examples to show off his brilliance. I'm positive that was not his intent, but it was the feeling I was left with anyway.
Third, I wish that so much of this book hadn't been focused on cancer specifically. In retrospect, that was the topic Mukherjee was clearly most interested in exploring, and that's alright. I just wish it had been clear earlier. I wanted to hear about other things - and there are other diseases that are briefly touched on, but none so much as cancer. Covid, the part I was perhaps most curious about, was given barely any attention, having the shortest section.
But there's a lot to really recommend this book. I loved the historic background whenever that was the focus. As I said, Mukherjee does a remarkable job making the material accessible. So I do think anyone interested in cellular biology and how medicine is advancing (specifically as it pertains to cancer), I would recommend picking this up! But not the audiobook. The narrator's pronunciations in parts were really rough. Especially when it came to words in other languages. I never want to hear Boutsikaris try to say anything in German ever again.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cancer and Medical content
Moderate: Death
taytots24's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cancer, Blood, and Medical content
Moderate: Death, Infertility, Terminal illness, and Pregnancy
Minor: Mental illness, Car accident, Death of parent, and Schizophrenia/Psychosis
whatthekatdraggedin's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cancer, Death, Terminal illness, Blood, Medical content, War, and Pandemic/Epidemic
Moderate: Ableism
readingrainbowroad's review
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Siddhartha Mukherjee is one of the best science writers of our time. Full stop.
Also a seriously great audiobook narrator!
As a microbial ecologist/evolutionary geneticist, I have serious background knowledge in a lot of the cellular topics Mukherjee writes about in this book, but very little when it comes to the human health aspects. As with his two previous books, he makes the topics extremely approachable - something particularly difficult when it comes to biochemistry and cellular biology - doesn't totally avoid the complicated nature of biology. I also love that he presents biology and science as a story in progress, not one that is already completely known and solved.
I don't give 5 stars often, but I can't think of anything I would change or improve on in this book.
Also a seriously great audiobook narrator!
As a microbial ecologist/evolutionary geneticist, I have serious background knowledge in a lot of the cellular topics Mukherjee writes about in this book, but very little when it comes to the human health aspects. As with his two previous books, he makes the topics extremely approachable - something particularly difficult when it comes to biochemistry and cellular biology - doesn't totally avoid the complicated nature of biology. I also love that he presents biology and science as a story in progress, not one that is already completely known and solved.
I don't give 5 stars often, but I can't think of anything I would change or improve on in this book.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Cancer
Minor: Medical content
rorikae's review
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
4.25
Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee is an informative look at the history of science surrounding the cell from discoveries to the people who have helped spur on these developments. Mukherjee takes the reader through different moments where cell biology made great strides from understanding IVF to AIDs. He does this by looking at different sides of the cell and a corresponding discovery.
Mukherjee's writing easily brings the reader into the topic and he breaks down complex scientific findings into easily understandable pieces. These individual sections build upon one another until the reader has a good understanding of the cell and how it works as a central piece of biology.
I will definitely be picking up more of Mukherjee's writing in the future because he makes science accessible and easy to understand in a way I have not seen before. He is a good teacher who understands how to build his student's (and reader's) understanding through small, digestible pieces of information that build to form a whole.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Infertility, Medical content, and Medical trauma