From complex to comprehensible

👉A prescription for engaging science writing 👈

It cannot be easy to make the story of the mosquito seem like an absorbing, pacy thriller. But journalist Sonia Shah does this masterfully in her book The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, adding yet another work to the growing pile of contemporary writings on medicine. Shah’s chronicle has been released at the right time in India — in the summer before the monsoon rains come, the season when mosquitoes thrive. She trails the pesky vectors and the tenacious malaria-causing parasite that they harbour, the tragedies, and the continuing onslaught of the fever that’s been around for millions of years despite numerous drugs and pesticides.

Shah’s book is part of an emerging genre of writing on health that’s caught the attention of readers who are not only students, researchers and academics. Writers like her have begun to tease medicine out of its rarefied preserve by using splendid prose to make niche concepts understandable to the general reader.

It is rare to see medical practitioners who are also good writers, but these exceptions have seen wild successes with their writing over the decades, from Atul Gawande’s sensitive exploration of ‘dying’ in Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End to Abraham Verghese’s fine medical novel and memoirs (Cutting for Stone and My Own Country) and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of all Maladies, which went on to become a bestseller. The late Paul Kalanithi’s only work, When Breath Becomes Air, enjoyed a popular run at bookstores with its personal chronicle of a neurosurgeon’s battle with lung cancer. An early initiator of the genre, neurologist Oliver Sacks’ works, including Awakenings, the 1973 classic on the encephalitis lethargica epidemic, were an inspiration.

Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks is an award-winning, riveting story of a poor tobacco farmer whose cervical cancer cells, taken without her knowledge, formed the basis for research in labs across the world. Writers like Skloot and Shah not only break down complex science into comprehensible stories, in an easy conversational style, but also deal with the broader questions of poverty, marginalisation, race and ethics. The U.K.-based Aarathi Prasad is a biologist, but also identifies herself as a writer. Her Like a Virgin is futuristic, and the theories of conception that she puts forth seem like veritable miracles. All of it is science though, just powerfully told.

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