The Parallel Lives

John D. Ratcliff was one of the most prolific magazine writers in the United States throughout the twentieth-century. He contributed more than 200 articles just to Reader’s Digest. Of those, his best known was a set of 33 articles that he entitled, “I Am Joe’s Body.”

     Each article was written from a first person viewpoint of an organ that explains its duty inside Joe’s body: “I Am Joe’s Liver,” “I Am Joe’s Heart,” “I Am Joe’s Lung,” “I Am Joe’s Pancreas.”

     Joe’s heart says, “I’m certainly no beauty. I weigh 12 ounces, I am red-brown in color, and I have an unimpressive shape. I am the dedicated slave of Joe.” 

     Someone reported that this was “the most successful series ever printed in the history of Reader’s Digest. Over seven million reprints of these articles were sold.”

     When a child in the early to mid-1960’s, I read several of those articles at my grandparent’s house. I found each interesting, but none convinced me to attempt medical school later.

     In recent days, I came across a most unusual book, first published in 1967, and entitled, “You Are Extraordinary,” by Roger J. Williams, professor of biochemistry at the University of Texas from 1940 to 1963. In it, Williams describes the variety of internal organs within a human body.

     Williams starts with a stomach. On page 24, he displays a sketch of a textbook stomach, but then offers a dozen more sketches of stomachs with differing sizes and shapes. He says, “The valve-like inlets and outlets to the stomach vary greatly in size, shape, and placement.

     “They also vary in their operation: some stomachs empty rapidly into the intestine, some slowly. Some people vomit readily when their stomachs are upset; others almost never do. 

     “A Mayo Foundation study of the gastric juices of about five thousand people who had no known stomach ailment showed that the juices varied at least a thousandfold in their pepsin content, the medium that holds a concentration of hydrochloric acid.

     “A percentage of normal people have no acid at all in their gastric juice,” an astonishing fact.

     Then, the stomach’s position varies. Williams identified nine positions, from high up in the chest to far down in the abdomen.

     Williams then turns to the tube that connects mouth to stomach. He says, “People eat with varying speeds due to the size of the esophagus through which food must pass.”

     As for the heart, “it is found that the hearts of some healthy young men pump only three quarts of blood a minute, while others can pump four times this much. Then, a heart’s inner construction does not always follow a single pattern.”

     Williams writes, “I had assumed that the piping system for carrying blood to all parts of the body was about the same in everyone. This is clearly untrue.” 

     For example, the branches that extend from the aorta and deliver blood to the neck and brain vary in number. “Some 65 percent of people have three branches, some 27 percent have two branches, and the remaining people have one, four, five or six branches.”

     On page 36, Williams displays a chart showing twelve normal livers, but in the caption, he writes, “the total weight of these livers varies about fourfold.” Some are huge. Some are small.

     Williams writes, “The endocrine glands—the thyroids, parathyroids, adrenals, pituitaries, and the pancreas—differ widely in normal individuals. For example, thyroid tissue varies in weight in ‘normal’ people from 8 to 50 grams.”

     Each human being is a singular entity, an individual, “distinctive in our makeup.” 

     Williams addresses the reader in his book’s Preface, “You are not precisely like anyone else; you are not approximately like anyone else. You are a remarkable and extraordinary person.”

     Whereas John D. Ratcliff described an internal organ in a general way, Roger J. Williams pointed out an organ’s widespread variations in structure.