Just to make things clear Gray's Anatomy is not Grey's Anatomy. The first (look for the "a') is a medical text over 150 years old, still in print. The second ("e') is the TV soap featuring doctors in makeup. As is usual, take the book and skip the show.

It's inconceivable that a textbook has become a book with wide public awareness, especially a book from the mid-nineteenth century. "Gray's' is the exception to prove the rule. More than anything else, "Gray's' is known by its beautifully labelled anatomical line drawings. Samples are published throughout Hayes' work and " more than 20 years after I studied anatomy and physiology " these helped me learn once again.

The Anatomist loves the wonder of the human body. Hayes even starts the prologue with a memory from his long-lost Roman Catholic childhood: "you are made in God's image'.
The drawings also exemplify something beguiling about "Gray's': not one of them is the work of Henry Gray. They were completed by an equally gifted anatomist, Henry Vandyke Carter. "Gray's' is known for the work not by Gray. So what do we know about Gray? Not much at all.

Hayes has great difficulty discovering much about the celebrated anatomist. What he could find is not revealing of Gray's life. No diary. No letters. Just biographical data. Like the famous illustrations, there is no colour left for Gray, just labels (dates, qualifications, official appointments).

Hayes instead directs his focus to the illustrator, who left a much fuller written record. This second Henry lived a fascinating life: medicine and art in England; medical teaching and scandal in India; medical research and standing in later life. Interestingly, Vandyke Carter was a convinced religious dissenter. The Anatomist provides glimpses of a faith that appears evangelical.

The stories of Henry Gray, Henry Vandyke Carter and of Bill Hayes intertwine throughout The Anatomist. For instance, Hayes took university anatomy and dissection classes to understand his subjects.

Yet there is something deeper still that unites these three men " that unites all of us. Death. Beautiful anatomical drawings require corpses. Such beauty in death! Those who study bodies " academics, trainee doctors, future physiotherapists " use the dead in order to care for the living. In the end, however, death catches and touches us all. A sad undercurrent of this work is that there's no escape from death, nor any way to prepare.

Henry Gray is famous for his study of the dead. A final irony is that Gray's manner of death is probably why we know nothing personal of him " infectious disease required destruction of all personal effects. What a contrast with Jesus Christ: famous for the cross of death, yet it was impossible for decay to take hold of him (Psalm 16:10).