The best thing I can say about this collection is what I consider the highest praise for any author's book - I'm going to read another one, specifically The Lives of a Cell, which based on the order of publication may have been more appropriate to read before The Medusa and the Snail; I won't lose sleep over it.
The Medusa and The Snail by Lewis Thomas (October 2020)
These are short essays based on an observation or meditation regarding an aspect of science - particularly biology, healthcare, or human nature. My favorites among these illuminating reads included "The Scrambler in the Mind" and "How to Fix the Premedical Curriculum", though the latter suffered slightly for lacking the exclusivity assumed by the author - the issue of early specialization is hardly a problem specific to medical students. My book notes contain a handful of observations that borrow from the perfect balance of brevity and insight achieved throughout this collection.
I've noticed that certain middling reviews of this work point out that these essays were perhaps too short, and that with a little additional effort Thomas could have expanded a few pages of work into book-length masterpieces. I understand these assertions and can speak to the value of the approach from experience, as my recent decision to focus longer writing into my Sunday posts has led me to new, unanticipated territory in my writing. However, to these reviewers I ask - doesn't the spirit of The Medusa and the Snail suggest you pick up where Thomas left off and dive deeper into these questions on your own, perhaps by exploring a specialist's work? I've said that studying economics taught me to ask "then what?", and I suspect the wonder of science summons the same inquiry, but as Thomas notes humans tend to be ignorant about nature, which I suspect is in part due to human nature, and its preference to preserve the status quo rather than explore the unknown.
One of my favorite ideas from the book was Thomas's comment that the fatal flaw of designing a human would be its perfection; humans exist to make mistakes, we evolved by screwing up, and as he puts it the consistent feature of any person is inconsistency. This serves as a loose theme across a number of the essays, including one where he notes that the value of linking healthy habits to preventing death is not in its strict truth, which is always questionable in such science, but rather in the way it encourages the incentive-driven person to find a reason to live well; the false drive toward living "perfectly" leads a person to prefer activity with immediate reward (like watching helmet football) ahead of critical habits that deliver the tiniest reward (like writing TOA reading reviews). The ultimate manifestation of this reality is that although we all know we will die someday, instead of building society to make the most of life within this constraint we have instead become collectively obsessed with spotless health, a focus that is to the detriment of living a full life. Thomas highlights his point by joking that one day we will all become doctors, spending our days giving each other constant screenings for the always-approaching disease.
The most important lesson of The Medusa and the Snail is that for all we know, we generally know all of nothing, including what to do with the little we happen to know. It smacks of a scholar's mission statement - the correct approach is to learn as much as possible in preparation for the unseen moment when the information can finally be put to its intended use. It's with this in mind that I've kept a few nuggets from this collection tucked away for later - that we are still honing the skill of worrying, that perhaps pain disappears the moment it become irrelevant for preventing death, or that problems caused by meddlers tinkering with complex problems are solved by removing the interveners. Of course, I must remember that all of this could have no value - Thomas asserts that the most important discovery in the history of medicine was the realization that all knowledge accumulated up until around 1850 was complete nonsense, which is a gentle reminder that when someone says we don't know what we don't know, perhaps we should also point out that we also often don't really know what we do know.
TOA Rating: Three snails out of four.
