From Publishers Weekly
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. (Dec. 26)
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From The New Yorker
Hayesβs history of the illustrated medical text "Grayβs Anatomy" coincides with the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of its first publication. Fascinated by the fact that little was known about the famous bookβs 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 bookβs 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. Georgeβs 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."
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