This isn’t what the doctors ordered

There ought to be a particularly dark corner of purgatory reserved for authors who sacrifice a great idea for a book on the altar of their own narcissism.

In more judicious or scrupulous hands, “The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy” could have been a fascinating book. The one that San Francisco-based science writer Bill Hayes has written, however, is -- by turns -- cloying, irritating and wrongheaded. In fact, it’s virtually a one-volume compendium of all that’s wrong with the nonfiction genre these days -- a syllabus of errors, particularly the pervasive fallacy that “how I got the story” is as interesting as the story itself. (The presumption that readers are interested in how the facts of the story made the author feel comes in a close second.)

This is the 150th anniversary of the first publication of “Gray’s Anatomy,” a book that is to the era of scientific medicine what the works of Galen and Avicenna were to the preceding ages, that is, a foundational text. First published in 1858, the book has been continuously in print and regularly updated. Today, you can purchase it in a print edition, as a CD-ROM or download it online. Hayes’ ostensible purpose is an excellent one: to give the first book-length account of the anatomy’s composition and to put flesh on its obscure makers.

It’s an intriguing story, starting with the fact that, while the book bears one man’s name, it actually was the work of two collaborating -- and equal -- young physicians in Victorian Britain. Henry Gray was a newly appointed lecturer on anatomy at St. George’s Hospital Medical School in London when he approached a young colleague and gifted artist, Henry Vandyke Carter, to work with him on a new anatomy text for medical students and surgeons. They collaborated intensely for 18 months, working from dissected corpses. Gray provided the text, and Carter did all the illustrations. (As medical scholars and commentators subsequently have pointed out, Gray’s text was remarkably clear and authoritative, but what set the book apart was the quality -- and size -- of Carter’s wonderfully precise illustrations.)

The two doctors

Gray was apparently the more ambitious and successful of the pair. His agreement with the publisher called for him to be paid a royalty of 150 pounds for every 1,000 copies of the text sold; Carter got a flat fee of 150 pounds and used the money to buy a microscope, which he took with him when he embarked for Bombay as a physician for the East India Co. while the book still was in galleys. Gray, who appears to have been on the fast track to a place in London’s medical firmament, died not long after the book was published after contracting smallpox from a nephew he was treating.

Carter spent his entire career on the subcontinent and, despite a tumultuous and rather scandalous first marriage, retired to England as the deputy surgeon general of India and subsequently was named honorary surgeon to Queen Victoria. He made a good second marriage, had children and died in 1897. He also left rather extensive diaries, and nearly all of what’s compelling and valuable in “The Anatomist” comes directly from those. They are, in fact, Hayes’ only significant original source. As he admits in the book, like other researchers before him, he came up empty when seeking the historical Henry Gray, who curiously died without even an obituary or the written tributes from colleagues that were common during that era.

Confronted with that vacuum, a serious writer might have turned to a detailed reconstruction of the era, which was itself a fascinating one. Only 26 years earlier, Parliament had passed the Anatomy Act, legalizing the dissection of unclaimed corpses from the workhouses that were a ubiquitous feature of urban England. By the time Gray and Carter came along, the old private anatomy schools -- holdovers from the time when study of the human body was tainted by grave robbing -- were closing, and medical schools had annexed anatomy to the scientific revolution that was reshaping medicine and so much else.

All about the author

Look elsewhere for that information. Instead, Hayes elected to fill in the gaps by enrolling in a medical school anatomy class and telling readers all about it:

“On the first day of class, I am mistaken for a teaching assistant six times, which, on the one hand, simply tells me I’m old . . . but, on the other hand, seems to imply that I look as if I belong. . . .

“The class size is 120 (150 if you count the cadavers). We had been warned beforehand that some students are overwhelmed by the first sight of the dead bodies. And sure enough, some students clearly are. But I am more freaked out by the woman in the gas mask. What does she know that the rest of us don’t?

“ ‘Class? Hello?’ comes a disembodied voice, tinnily amplified. This is Sexton Sutherland, one of the three professors for this ten-week course in gross anatomy at UCSF. . . . ‘Before we get started, some housekeeping rules: No eating your lunch in here.’ This elicits a collective ewwwww . . . .”

And so it goes, with Hayes switching back and forth between his anatomy class, various trips to the various research libraries -- including digressions on the indignities of wearing used gloves when handling rare books -- and extended quotations from Carter’s diaries. These are often fascinating, but Hayes is like one of those dreadful dinner party guests who is only interested in what other people have to say because it reminds them of something about themselves.

Thus, when Carter -- who appears to have suffered from melancholy bordering on clinical depression -- agonizes over sexual desire in a rather typically Victorian sort of way, it reminds Hayes of his own struggle to “come out” as a homosexual. Why the author’s sexual orientation is of the slightest interest to anybody but the writer or his intimates or what relevance it has to a historical study of “Gray’s Anatomy” is anybody’s guess.

Like the real life of Henry Gray, it’s just one of the mysteries this annoying book leaves unsolved.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com