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.

Hayes’s journey begins in the prologue, where he describes pulling Gray’s great volume off his shelf one day and suddenly noticing its author glaring at the camera like a “pintsized Heathcliff” from the middle of a class portrait (complete with cadaver) taken at St. George’s Hospital, London, in 1860. Hayes had bought the book for the pictures, which he generally used “to ID parts on their way out: A good friend’s cancerous pancreas. My sister’s uterus, at the time of her partial hysterectomy. My boyfriend’s pituitary gland tumor.” Suddenly, he finds himself wondering about the book’s author. “Gray’s face seized my imagination,” Hayes recalls, “in a way that I can only compare — odd as this may sound — to love at first sight: an overpowering desire to get to know this man as thoroughly as possible.”