I had high expectations for my re-read Mary Roach’s Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. Surely when I first read it, back in 2014, I simply hadn’t noticed all the cool speech pathology stuff because I didn’t realize how important swallowing is to the typical medical SLP. Mary Roach is great at finding big, colourful personalities working in odd scientific niches, and I was excited to settle in and discover some speech-language superstars.
So it’s with deep personal sorrow that I have to report that while this book remains delightful, there are no Ian Malcolms of speech-language. Even in the chapter that looks at dysphagia in-depth, we mostly meet “oral processing experts” or “oral physiologists”. In the chapter Spit Gets a Polish: Someone ought to bottle the stuff, I wound up on a long, deep rabbit hole trying to figure out the exact speciality of the saliva expert we spend most of our time with, Erika Silletti PhD, and it turns out she is a chemist. A chemist! Not only that, she recounts a terrible experience presenting at a conference for dentists:
[Silletti] later told me the presentation she gave there was met with blank looks. “They think of it as lubricating, and that’s it!” She went back to her hotel room and called her boyfriend in tears.
Dr Silletti, I feel confident that your presentation about saliva would get a WAY better reception in a conference room full of speech pathologists.
Overall, this book is absolutely worth reading, especially if you have a strong stomach. In terms of speech-language pathology, you can have a lot of fun spotting the facts related to dysphagia, even if they're rarely presented as such.