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The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy

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In The Anatomist, author Bill Hayes tells two stories. The first is of Dr. Henry Gray, of Gray's Anatomy: The 19th-century doctor wasn't the mad-scientist-type that you might imagine, stooped over human specimens, meticulously assigning Latinate esoterica to each gory detail. In fact, there's not much to say about Dr. Gray's personality — he largely kept to himself and died at a young age of smallpox. So, to shed additional light on autopsy's human side, Hayes walks readers through his own experience of gruesome anatomy lessons at UC San Francisco. The resulting portrait of the body as a flesh-and-bone object touches a deeply personal note that's not for the faint of heart.

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