The Anatomist is not just the story of the 1858 medical textbook we call Gray's Anatomy (originally titled Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical). It's also a personal memoir from Bill Hayes - a witty, self-deprecating and elegantly literate author of two previous medically themed books: Sleep Demons, about insomnia, and Five Quarts, about blood.

Hayes, intrigued by the anatomical drawing on the front cover, bought a copy of Gray's Anatomy in the early 1980s, but seldom used it. More recently, he discovered that there was no biography of the author, brilliant 19th century anatomist Henry Gray. Hayes decided to write one, but found that Gray had left behind remarkably little in the way of personal papers.

One fact particularly surprised Hayes: Gray did not create any of the nearly 400 anatomical drawings in Gray's Anatomy. They were actually produced by a Henry Vandyke Carter. Carter was younger than Gray but, like him, was remarkably skilled at dissection. In addition, he had the artistic talent to make anatomical drawings that were both accurate and strangely beautiful.

To understand Gray better, Hayes sat in on three hands-on anatomy courses at the University of California San Francisco, (UCSF) dissecting donated corpses with future pharmacists, physiotherapists and doctors. With the skills of a novelist, he describes his fellow students and their teachers, and the actual dissections they performed - investigating the articulation of the joints of the arm, for example, or the length of the digestive tract.

Meanwhile, Hayes discovered a cache of Carter's papers held in a London library. He ordered copies of them, hoping for "a glimpse of the inscrutable Henry Gray". The reader watches over Hayes's shoulder as he works through Carter's diaries and letters. He is revealed as a tortured soul, self-doubting and melancholy. His friendship with the older and more successful Gray, and their collaboration on their textbook, Gray's Anatomy, are bright spots in his life.

Wound through the anatomy classes and Hayes's journey through Carter's papers are affectionate accounts of his time in the Special Collections Room of UCSF's medical library, where the librarian presented him with wondrous finds, including,spectacularly, a second edition of Andreas Vesalius's masterpiece De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body), dated 1555.