Childhood Fascination: The Human Body

The other night, I watched the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, a film that I had not seen since middle school science class – at the time we were studying the workings of the human body. In the movie, the research submarine Proteus and its crew are shrunk down to the size of a microbe and injected into a scientist to locate and remove a blood clot while racing against the clock. Murphy’s Law kicks in and if anything can go wrong, it will – the team gets diverted through a fistula, experiences technical problems, and a member of the crew has different motivations. The plot is mimicked in numerous other works, including cartoons (Futurama and Rugrats, for example), and attractions like the Body Wars motion simulator at what was then known as EPCOT Center.

Fantastic Voyage is considered a classic in the science fiction movie genre, and in an era before CGI (and even the Apollo moon landing), while looking dated today, the special effects were state of the art for the time. The film was praised for its accurate depictions of anatomy and the workings of the human body. While accurate, however, the movie was scrutinized for physical inaccuracies and plot-holes – aside from a need to explain why the Proteus did not grow back to normal size after being consumed by the white blood cell or why the crew did not suffer the side effects of deep water diving and breathing differently sized atoms, my neurodivergent mind fixated on the fact that the TWA Boeing 707 in the opening scene changed its registration as it taxied at the airport – it was initially N746TW, but as it came to a stop on the tarmac it had apparently changed to N744TW before returning back to N746TW, something that a normal mind probably would not have paid much attention to.

Years before that middle school science class, something else kicked off my interest in the human body. One day, my mother brought home from the library a copy of “How Your Body Works”, an illustrated book that uses robots and other machines to emulate the workings of the human body. The immune system, for example, was depicted as being a castle defended by knights (white blood cells) from attacking “germs” (depicted a green hairy creatures).

After that, I was into all things about how the body worked – how babies were made, what happens in digestion, the working of the brain, and more. In fact, in an alternative universe, I probably could have been a doctor, and to this day, I have absolutely no idea why my teachers did not tell me about this potential as they covered my handwriting assignments with lots of red ink (that was on a good day, on a bad day, they would just tear up my work and force me to re-write it), though with my fainting tendencies, maybe that was for the better.

As with other interests, that of the human body had long since faded, but never went away. Over the years I’ve played a few games relating to health care – notably Theme Hospital by Bullfrog, which takes a lighthearted approach to running a hospital alongside its spiritual successor, Two Point Hospital and the more “serious” Project Hospital. During insomnia filled nights I might pull up Wikipedia and read up on the development of the digestive system or the actual function of the spleen and how the body can survive if it has to be removed. There are many aspects of the body that even top sciences have yet to explain, such as the full workings of the brain, the purpose of hiccups, and the evolutionary reasoning behind that ticking time-bomb in our abdomen known as the appendix – in fact, reading Wikipedia might have helped me to dodge a bullet after I rode my bike to an urgent care clinic and then the ER due to some mild abdominal pain. The nurse at the ER questioned my decision to check myself in, but I knew I was not going to be able to sleep that night unless I was sure I was going to be okay. I did not sleep a wink – not because they sent me home, but because the CT technician had confirmed my suspicions. Sleeping in my own bed does not come easy, but sleeping in a hospital bed in a busy emergency room in the year 2020 is downright impossible. The next morning I was in for surgery to get that time-bomb safely diffused and I was able to go home the next day with only some pain-killers and instructions to avoid heavy lifting – no special diets, etc.. Modern medicine has definitely come a long way since leeches and hacksaws.

To this day I still have a fascination with the workings of the human body and do wonder how different life would have been if my teachers had seen the potential when grading my handwriting.