No matter what is transpiring in the terrorist cells of Pakistan or the torture chambers of Iraq or the wire cages of Guantanamo Bay, nothing will ever be as sick, revolting, and hopeless as what goes on daily in the set of cells and chambers that comprise your own body. All the baffling afflictions and horrifying physical ailments of the human self are explicated, enumerated, and flawlessly alphabetized in my favorite new book, The American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin, $27).
Heavier and full of more disgusting shit than a constipated baby, Stedman's Medical Dictionary is an exploration of the perils of being a human, beginning, as any perilous catalog should, with Aarskog-Scott syndrome, "characterized by an exaggerated width between the eyes, anteverted nostrils, broad upper lip, saddle-bag scrotum, and lax ligaments resulting in hyperextension of the knee, flat feet, and hyperextensible fingers." (Basically, if you have Aarskog-Scott syndrome, you have some problems.) In short, Stedman's Medical Dictionary is great late-night reading.
While arguably unsuitable for younger readers (it contains words that are inherently terrifying, such as "fallopian") and at times elusive (I do not know, and do not want to know, what a "saddle-bag scrotum" is), adults will delight in the book's copiousness and its subtle humor--as is achieved, often, by the comedic delay of the most important point. Seckel syndrome, for example, is "an inherited disorder characterized by low birth weight, dwarfism, microcephaly, large eyes, beaked nose, receding chin, and mental retardation."
I have to say, Houghton Mifflin is on the ball, down to every last pouch, polyp, lobe, cyst, follicle, and fatty sheath. But as rapturously as you may wish to take it all in, it's best to proceed cautiously. For the overly hasty, opportunities for misreading abound. Note that gonorrhea, for instance, is caused by gonococci, which are bacteria, and not gnocchi, which are potato dumplings. Further, one should not casually flip to the end of the book--an appendix of unsightly and potentially traumatic anatomical diagrams--if one is of delicate sensibilities. As fond as I am of testicles, I guess I just prefer to appreciate them at a more ignorant remove.
Aside from bringing to light a host of new health hazards for you to worry about (sarcoptic mites, vascular dementia), Stedman's Medical Dictionary just as readily describes things you can be thankful you don't have to think about, such as urethrophymas (penis tumors), obstructive dysmenorrhea ("dysmenorrhea caused by an obstruction to the escape of the menstrual blood"), and sphenocephaly ("the condition of having a wedge- shaped head"). No matter how grave the terror alerts get, you can always say to yourself, "At least I don't have scrofuloderma."
