Book Review: Fearfully and Wonderfully – The Marvel of Bearing God’s Image, by Scipio
Dr. Brand tells a story of training a group of interns in India. While observing one of them doing a difficult diagnosis of a patient, Dr. Brand noticed an ever so slight expression on the intern’s face when he discovered the source of the patient’s problem. It reminded him of the same expression he saw on his mentor, Dr Pilcher’s face when he diagnosed a patient’s problem. Dr. Brand saw that same expression in this intern’s face. The other interns asked Dr. Brand when did he know the intern discovered the problem? Dr. Brand said that it was because of that slight facial expression during the intern’s examination. Astonished, the other interns said, “but Dr. Brand, that is your expression he was wearing!”
Although the interns had never met Dr. Pilcher, they recognized the image. It seems Dr. Pilcher’s image of a successful diagnosis was imprinted on the young Paul Brand who now had imprinted it on another generation of doctors. So should our life also be, if someone has never seen Jesus our life should always be reflecting His image.
Growing up in India, Paul Brand’s father was a missionary/doctor. As a child, young Brand’s job was to clean up the blood after his father’s operations and surgical procedures. He grew to hate the site and smell of blood.
Desiring to be a missionary like his father, the mission board required Paul to learn basic medical diagnosis at a hospital in London. One day when assigned to take blood pressure of patients in the emergency room, a woman was rushed in hemorrhaging blood. The doctors and nurses scrambled to gather blood and other things for an operation. Young Brand was left by himself to monitor the woman’s blood pressure. Feeling a sense of helplessness with his hand on the woman’s wrist he felt the woman’s pulse slowing down and finally stopping. At that moment, a nurse rushed in with a pint of blood and began a transfusion. While still holding the woman’s hand, Paul Brand felt the woman’s pulse slowly come back and life return to the woman. Dr. Brand said, “The memory of shed blood had kept me out of medicine; the power of shared blood ultimately led me to apply to medical school. I had seen a miracle, a corpse resurrected. If medicine, if blood could do this…”
Phillip Yancy spent 10 years with Dr. Brand getting to know him, often following him on trips. Yancy described their collaboration as, “I gave words to his faith, in exchange he gave faith to my words.” During that time Dr. Brand showed Yancy a 90-page manuscript he intended to write an autobiography but never finished. Upon Dr. Brand’s death, and with the help of Dr. Brand’s family, that manuscript became the basis for Fearfully and Wonderfully. Yancy added stories to it from Dr. Brand’s life and expanded on Dr. Brand’s medical and spiritual insights therein.
Written in the first-person voice of Dr. Brand, this book is a virtual primer of the intricacies of the human body and its connection, relationship, and dependency to its related parts. Dr. Brand starts with a simple cell, ending the book with the complexities of the synapses in the brain. He constantly compared the human body being made up of many parts to the Apostle Paul’s metaphor of the Church being the Body of Christ in II Corinthians 12.
A child once asked the simple question, “What does blood do all day?”. Dr. Brand goes into detail answering that question describing the function of blood with oxygen, amino acids, minerals and salts, sugars, lipids, cholesterols, and hormones carrying away refuse, exhaust gases, and worn-out chemicals through sixty thousand miles of blood vessels all in a thirty second round trip while drawing analogies with Matthew 26:27-28.
Simply put, in Fearfully and Wonderfully, Dr. Brand uses a telescope to describe the immensity of God’s creation, and then uses a microscope to show how the human body reflects God’s image. It’s like Dr. Brand is making an introduction, “Science, meet faith. Faith meet science. You are both related.”
In a narrative that is spell binding, Dr. Brand goes through the process of a woman’s pregnancy in detail regarding the changes in the female body from the time of conception to the time of the placenta being expelled after birth.
In addition, Dr. Brand deftly describes the function and form of various bodily functions and components such as; hemostasis, bone ossification, osteoblasts and osteoclasts, electro-negative charging synapses, chemicals, fat, blood, bone, red blood cells, white blood cells (Dr. Brand calls them “elite special forces”), nerves, skin and the brain.
Understanding our own mortal bodily pain, Dr. Brand draws the analogy to I Corinthians 12:26 describing how if one member of the body of Christ suffers, so do the others just like in the human body when one part suffers the whole body suffers.
It seems like Fearfully and Wonderfully crams eight hundred pages of information and insights into two hundred and sixty four pages! It’s like reading two books simultaneously; one on anatomy and another on how anatomy reflects God’s image. You can read the medical observations quickly, but it takes time to meditate on Dr. Brand’s spiritual insights into the image of God reflected in our bodies. This book is far from a tedious read, rather, it is engaging, thought provoking, educational, and its spiritual implications demands stopping and meditating on them.
As a bonus, Philip Yancey has included a “Discussion Guide” at the end of the book written by Dr. Brand’s daughters, Joannie and Bridget.