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 greatstories, is infinitely rich in between.

"At 150 years old, Gray's Anatomy still sets the standard in medical textbooks, yet little has been written about its author, Henry Gray. Even less celebrated is Henry Carter, the illustrator who brought Gray's groundbreaking anatomy text to life. Hayes (Sleep Demons: An Insomniac's Memoir) explores the lives of these two men, balancing biographical chapters with his own experience in the anatomy classroom, dissecting cadavers and marveling at each new discovery with prose both lucid and arrestingly beautiful: 'Like a pomegranate, whose leathery rind belies its jewel box interior, the kidney is spectacular inside.' From Carter's diary entries, Hayes recreates an era when medical advances were rapidly changing the way people lived as well as challenging religious dogma, and people turned to science in hopes of reconciling the two. Hayes finds emotional resonance in Carter's longing for a job that would matter, as well as in his internal conflicts as a Protestant Dissenter and his fear of professing his despised beliefs in public. As Hayes relates his own growing wonder and respect for anatomy, one feels the echo of Carter and Gray's devotion as they worked to create what one historian called 'an affordable, accurate teaching aid.' Hayes pays eloquent tribute to two masterpieces: the human body and the book detailing it." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"'If anything is sacred,' the poet and nurse Walt Whitman assured us, 'the human body is sacred.' And for 150 years, it has had a sacred text: a 6-by-9 1/2-inch volume that, from its first printing, violated all principles of bookselling. Grabby title? Try 'Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical.' Human interest? Only if you want to know what your spleen looks like. Or your nasal duct or your femur. And... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) if it's hot-toddy prose you're after, then lap up this entirely characteristic sentence: 'The fasciae are fibroareolar or aponeurotic laminae of variable thickness and strength found in all regions of the body.' Not exactly a recipe for book clubs.

And yet this same text, better known today as 'Gray's Anatomy,' has never once gone out of print and, according to journalist Bill Hayes, 'it has to date seen thirty-five editions in the United States alone. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages, been pored over by generation after generation of medical students, and sold millions of copies.' And, we need hardly add, its title has been co-opted by a ridiculously popular nighttime soap featuring surgical interns who sleep with their bosses.

Whole generations of TV viewers might reasonably open this slender, thoughtful volume expecting the latest on McDreamy and McSteamy. They will instead find two real-life doctors who would have been forcibly removed from any medical-show casting call. One was too short, one was too gloomy, but they welded their differing temperaments into one of the world's great textbooks, a model of clarity and erudition and, yes, art.

Begin with Gray himself. Henry Gray, a young lecturer at London's St. George's Hospital, was commissioned in 1855 to write a manual of anatomy for students. Earlier manuals had been incorrect or incomplete, and because cultural taboos had long made dissection a crime, anatomy was still a young science. The time had come for a definitive text, and Gray, who knew a thing or two about bodies, was the man for the job.

Sadly, he couldn't savor his success: Smallpox claimed him at the age of 34. His papers were likely destroyed with him, but all contemporary accounts paint him as honest, industrious and mild — everything fatal for a biographer. As a result, Hayes is forced to resurrect the forgotten partner in 'Gray's Anatomy': Henry Vandyke Carter, the itchy-in-his-own-skin physician-artist who produced the book's 363 engravings. Carter's 'great innovation,' writes Hayes, 'was to place the anatomical names right on the parts themselves, like street names on a road map.'

The resulting illustrations are austerely beautiful, but Carter doesn't make much of a protagonist, either, even though his diary is squeezed for every possible drop of emotional color. The one scandal in his life took place in faraway India several years after the book's publication, and he finished his days in prestigious retirement in Scarborough, England, surrounded by a wife and two young children.

In short, none of Hayes' skill can make the creation of 'Gray's Anatomy' more dramatic than it really was, and a reader may suspect that 'The Anatomist' is really a magazine article promoted above its station. Ironically, though, the digressions that pad the book out to full length are also its saving graces. 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.

It's not just the random facts that enchant. (Did you know bones are 'pale rose,' not 'bone white'?) It's also Hayes' talent for making the familiar strange. 'A tongue in profile,' he writes, 'does not remotely resemble the one you see in your bathroom mirror; it is far thicker and longer than you would ever expect. Beyond the pebbly portion at the back of the mouth, there is a full third you never see, which curves down into the pharynx, the top of the throat.'

Like any good teacher, Hayes has a knack for metaphor. The still, close air in an anatomy lab is 'like the gym of the dead.' A lung is 'a wet mound of gray taffeta,' a kidney is 'a pomegranate, whose leathery rind belies its jewel box interior,' the hand is ' a minefield of nerves' and a human head with the skullcap removed is 'a nightmare cookie jar.' Hayes is particularly struck by 'the sound of skin being pulled off, a tearing sound, like old Con-Tact paper being torn from a shelf. With the removal of the skin, what remains on the torso is a lumpy coating of bright yellow fat. It does not just scoop off; it has to be either cut or plucked away with tweezers.' Um, ew.

All laud and honor to Hayes, though. 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.'"

Reviewed by Louis Bayard, a novelist and reviewer, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Advance praise for The Anatomist

“In his cunningly structured, beautifully written anatomy of Gray’s Anatomy, Bill Hayes dissects the body’s secrets, the lives of two great nineteenth-century explorers of those secrets–and some of his own obsession as well. A lovely book.”

–Andrea Barett, author of Ship Fever

“Bill Hayes has written a thrilling book that is simultaneously an autobiography, a biography of Henry Gray, a scientific essay on our human anatomy, and a heart-breaking elegy. I do not know another book like it.”

–Richard Rodriguez, author of Hunger of Memory

“The Anatomist is many things: a study of the body after life has left it, a chronicle of scientists obsessed with the subject, and, in a heartbreakingly personal way, a memoir. It is also a reflection about how little was known about disease not that long ago. Finally, it is a biography of an anxious, neurotic, enormously sympathetic young anatomist from another time who changed medicine. This is a wonderful book.”

–Robert M. Sapolsky, author of A Primate’s Memoir

“Hayes pays eloquent tribute to two masterpieces: the human body and the book detailing it. . . . [He balances] biographical chapters with his own experience in the anatomy classroom, dissecting cadavers and marveling at each new discovery with prose both lucid and arrestingly beautiful.”

–Publishers Weekly

"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, part culture 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.

Bill Hayes is the author of the national bestseller Sleep Demons: An Insomniac’s Memoir and Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine and Details, among other publications, and at Salon.com. He has also been featured on many NPR programs as well as the Discovery Health Channel. He lives in San Francisco. Visit the author’s website at www.bill-hayes.com.