The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy by Bill Hayes

From the Publisher

"Hayes’s history of the illustrated medical text “Gray’s Anatomy” coincides with the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of its first publication. Fascinated by the fact that little was known about the famous book’s genesis, Hayes combed through nineteenth-century letters and medical-school records, learning that, besides Henry Gray, the brilliant scholar and surgeon who wrote the text, another anatomist was crucial to the book’s popularity: Henry Vandyke Carter, who provided its painstaking drawings. Hayes moves nimbly between the dour streets of Victorian London, where Gray and Carter trained at St. George’s Hospital, and the sunnier classrooms of a West Coast university filled with athletic physical therapists in training, where he enrolls in anatomy classes and discovers that “when done well, dissection is very pleasing aesthetically.” - The New Yorker

"All laud and honor to Hayes....In perusing the body's 650 muscles and 206 bones, he has made the case that we are, as the psalmist wrote, "fearfully and wonderfully made" and that dissection has an aesthetic all its own. The act of carving open a body becomes, in this context, a perverse act of love, a desecration that consecrates "the extraordinary, the inner architecture of the human form." - The Washington Post

"How do you write a book about someone about whom next to nothing is known? For most writers, the answer would be move on to the next subject. But Bill Hayes has an unusual set of skills. The author of previous books on insomnia and blood, he is part science writer, part memoirist, partculture explainer. “The Anatomist,” his appealing new book about the man behind Gray’s Anatomy, combines his search for the remaining traces of Henry Gray with a memoir of his own experience as a dissection student and a scalpel’s-eye tour of the body." - The New York Times

"Some of [Hayes's] most memorable writing describes the dissection classes he attended in San Francisco. We are treated to a selection of fascinating anatomical snippets about, for example, how to trace evidence of the sealed hole in the fetal heart through which the mother's blood enters; or how to find the kidney in a cadaver; or that blood flowing out of the heart is first used to feed the heart itself; or, best of all, a structural analysis of how the Queen manages to deliver such a uniquely restrained wave." - Nature: The International Weekly Journal of Science

The classic medical text known as Gray’s Anatomy is one of the most famous books ever written. Now, on the 150th anniversary of its publication, acclaimed science writer and master of narrative nonfiction Bill Hayes has written the fascinating, never-before-told true story of how this seminal volume came to be. A blend of history, science, culture, and Hayes’s own personal experiences, The Anatomist is this author’s most accomplished and affecting work to date.

With passion and wit, Hayes explores the significance of Gray’s Anatomy and explains why it came to symbolize a turning point in medical history. But he does much, much more. Uncovering a treasure trove of forgotten letters and diaries, he illuminates the astonishing relationship between the fiercely gifted young anatomist Henry Gray and his younger collaborator H. V. Carter, whose exquisite anatomical illustrations are masterpieces of art and close observation. Tracing the triumphs and tragedies of these two extraordinary men, Hayes brings an equally extraordinary era–the mid-1800s–unforgettably to life.

But the journey Hayes takes us on is not only outward but inward–through the blood and tissue and organs of the human body–for The Anatomist chronicles Hayes’s year as a student of classical gross anatomy, performing with his own hands the dissections and examinations detailed by Henry Gray 150 years ago. As Hayes’s acquaintance with death deepens, he finds his understanding and appreciation of life deepening in unexpected and profoundly moving ways.

The Anatomist is more than just the story of a book. It is the story of the human body, a story whose beginning and end we all know and share but that, like all great stories, is infinitely rich in between.

The Washington Post - Louis Bayard

To enter into the proper spirit, Hayes spent a year taking gross anatomy classes at the University of California-San Francisco, and his descriptions of the experience evoke the legacy of Gray and Carter more forcefully than any dusty diary could.

The New York Times - D. T. Max

It's [his] gentle, inquiring approach that finally binds Hayes's somewhat disjointed Anatomy together. I wanted to hear a bit about, say, the "resurrection men" whose job it was to supply doctors up until Gray's era with fresh corpses often stolen from graveyards. But that is not Hayes's style. When we turn green, he is there to remind us to calm down. Traditionally, anatomy professors have left their mortal remains to the lab. One suspects that when his time comes, Hayes will join their ranks and this engaging book will not be his only tribute to the profession.

Kirkus Reviews

Science writer Hayes (Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood, 2005, etc.) combines a you-are-there account with interesting biographical details about the men who put the human body on the map. The map is Gray's Anatomy, the reference work, originally titled Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical, used by generations of medical students since its first edition was published in 1858. Curious to know more about the brilliant teacher who had the revolutionary idea of writing an anatomy text to assist surgeons, the author learned that there wasn't much to tell: Henry Gray died young and horribly of smallpox. The meticulous illustrator of Gray's text, however, had a long, extraordinary life, and Hayes found a trove of diaries and letters to flesh it out. Henry Vandyke Carter, a few years younger than Gray, was a diffident figure, confident in his drawing skills but given to dark moods, self-blame and anxieties about religious faith. Nevertheless, the two Henrys worked well together and produced to glowing acclaim a revolutionary volume. Gray did well financially, but many of Carter's duties were unpaid. He finally moved to Bombay, where he conducted research, taught anatomy and practiced medicine. His exemplary career was blighted by a scandalous love affair with a woman who bore him a child. Hayes unfolds a Hollywood-like plot, complete with a (sort-of) happy ending. Interspersed with this story, the author relates his personal experiences in gross-anatomy classes, conveying a sense of wonder at the beauty and complexity of the human body and the evolutionary compromises that have shaped it. No dull required course here-a vivid tale populated with flesh-and-blood characters, from thetwo Henrys to the cadavers themselves. Agent: Wendy Weil/Wendy Weil Agency

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