I am a physiologist — a professor and head of department, and a PhD researcher who came to the discipline by conviction rather than by accident. My days are spent deconstructing the body’s mechanisms for the doctors I teach, and my instinct is always to step back and read the whole before the parts — to find the forest while everyone else is lost among the trees.
This is where that instinct wanders off the syllabus.
Vital Signs is what happens when a physiologist reads the world the way she reads the body: closely, and for meaning. I write here about the science beneath ordinary life, about travel and the wonder it uncovers, about faith and the Creator’s hand in the mechanism, and about the long, unfinished work of becoming oneself. Some of it is rigorous; some reflective. All of it is written for the reader who needed, on a particular day, to hear exactly this.
I am not done with life until I am done with life. Consider this the record of the rest of it.
Onwards and forwards.
Ayisha Qureshi 