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开 本: 32开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 精装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780345456892
”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.
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
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