The Language of Cells
The Language of Cells
(Softcover)
As a surgical pathologist for more than twenty-five years, Spencer Nadler was not content with the distance between his lab and the patient. Meeting with those whose diseased cells he has diagnosed, he offers them a rare understanding.
Hanna Baylan is a woman as determined as he is to confront the cancer cells biopsied from her breast. Comille, a young boy with Sickle Cell anemia, has frequent racking pain, but doesn’t let it interfere with his gusto for life. And 91-year old-conductor Mehli Mehta inspires comparison between the cellular rhythms that threaten his heart and those that govern his work. In these intimate, lyrical portraits of people and their cells, Nadler brings a unique clarity and compassion to medicine.
Life as Seen Under the Microscope
(Hardcover)
With this beautiful book, Spencer Nadler takes us into the remarkable world of cells—and into the lives of people whose behavior is affected by the cells seen under his microscope. After twenty-five years as a surgical pathologist, Nadler began to miss interacting with people whose cells he studied. And so, he came out from behind his microscope and as a writer began to focus on people as well as on their cells, examining in this unusual book how a person’s life and spirit—and cells—coexist.
In the diminutive landscape of the microscope, a young patient’s sickle cells look like harmless apples and bananas, but the impact they have on him and his mother is acute. Under Nadler’s microscope, normal breast cells look like pink hydrangeas to the remarkably spirited Hanna, and her breast cancer cells like distorted Hula Hoops. Among the other people we meet are an orchestra conductor who must choose between the rhythms of his music and those of his heart, an obese woman who must learn to get along with her fat cells as she copes with bariatric surgery, and two people with early Alzheimer’s disease who fall in love and decide to live together despite the changes in their brains. In The Language of Cells, Spencer Nadler illuminates in lyrical prose “the quiet heroics of everyday people,” as cells and the spirit contribute to the beauty of the human continuum.
