The best and most compelling novels in which anatomy plays a key role

You know the movies, but maybe not Mary Shelley’s novel. Published in 1818 and revised in 1821, it’s a disquieting story of things going very wrong between a negligent parent (Victor von Frankenstein) and his sensitive child (the monster he created).

I identify with both sides of the equation. I also take Shelley's Frankenstein as a rich historical document of Romantic fascination with anatomy and the illicit grave robbery that supplied bodies to the dissecting tables. And “galvanism,” which Giovanni Aldini publicly demonstrated in 1803 by placing electrodes on the corpse of an executed criminal, causing his legs and arms to twitch spasmodically, seemingly making the dead man come alive.

Combine that with ambivalent meditations on the wilds of human and non-human Nature. And monsters and murder. And wow! The novel that invented gothic horror. (Don’t worry about the florid old-fashioned prose. Once you’re in the flow, this book is a page-turner.)

I was 10 when I read Tom Sawyer. Which I loved but didn’t entirely get. To boy Mike, the midnight graveyard scene, featuring two thuggish bodysnatchers and a young unthuggish doctor, was mysterious, unmotivated. I didn’t know why bodysnatchers snatched bodies. But 19th-century readers, even children, did know: bodysnatchers stole cadavers for medical students to dissect. (Anatomy was in vogue, and medical schools lacked a supply of legal bodies.) But that’s not all.

A few chapters later, Twain presented boy Mike with another anatomical episode to puzzle over: Mr. Dobbins, Tom’s ill-tempered schoolmaster, discovers that some student has managed to unlock the drawer in his desk where he keeps his prized anatomical atlas. Dobbins is furious: a page has been torn. Unbeknownst to Dobbins, the culprit is Becky Sharp (Tom’s crush), who thereby gets to see something naughty that only anatomy books can show: “a handsomely engraved” color illustration of “a human figure, stark naked.” (Tom wins Becky’s heart by gallantly taking the blame and punishment for her crime.) And that’s how anatomy, with its death-and-sex mystique, figures in Twain’s classic children’s book.

No one reads this book nowadays, but in the 1840s and 50s, readers were captivated: it was the nation’s most popular novel. Published in monthly installments, the style is lurid, hallucinatory, a fever delirium, as befits a hastily improvised serial novel written by Edgar Allen Poe’s bestie.

The plot is impossible to summarize, but try this: “Monks Hall” is a place where Philadelphia’s elite—politicians, ministers, publishers, medical professors, businessmen, judges, and lawyers—go to fraternally seduce and rape virgins, torture and murder their enemies, and revel in their hypocrisy. And the ringleader, or maybe just the concierge, is Devil-Bug, a ghoulish murderer, blackmailer, thief, and bodysnatcher.

The novel consists of a succession of terrible things these terrible men do to good women, orphans, and weak men. One bad thing after another… It’s like Dickens on a bad acid trip. And, of course, anatomy figures. I’ll just cite two memorable scenes. First, an extended visit to Dr McTourniquet’s anatomical museum, in which the freaky objects in jars and the pretensions of scientific Reason are mocked as utterly superficial compared to the monstrous depravity of real Evil.

Second, a medical lecture is convened by the mysterious Signor Ravoni and the city's eminent medical professors are all in attendance. (In the 1840s, Philadelphia was famous as the nation’s medical capital.) A bodysnatcher wheels out an anatomical subject covered with a sheet. But when the sheet is removed, the body is revealed to be a “reeking mass” of corruption. The entire audience bolts in horror.

This book isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s an unrelenting wallow in antebellum violence and rape culture—but also a crazed jeremiad bemoaning the corruption of American democracy. And a clairvoyant anticipation of the torture and murder enacted in streaming television and video games that many present-day Americans consume on a nightly basis.

This book is a largely forgotten historical novel that is itself a historical artifact: a swooning love-letter to New York, published in 1927 when the city seemed to be the unique locus of urban industrial modernity. 

The story goes like this: It's New York at the start of the 20th century. Through gritty determination, native intelligence, physical strength, and sheer goodness, John Breen, a penniless orphan, attains success and true love, against all odds and temptations. Though not a Jew, as “Fighting Lipvitch,” Breen becomes the hero-pugilist of the Jewish Lower East Side—and a favorite of “uptown swells.” But Breen is completely illiterate, and after tearfully confessing his shameful secret, Pug Malone, his beloved trainer, sends him to night school. Where Breen learns to read, becomes a voracious reader, and then quits prize-fighting. Aided by upper-class patrons Judge Kelly and Gilbert Van Horn (whose shameful secret is that he is actually the boxer’s father), Breen attends Columbia University to study civil engineering. Upon graduation, his first big project is building water tunnels that will bring clean upstate reservoir water to the polluted city. It’s dangerous work—many men are maimed and killed—and Breen heroically rescues many workers in a catastrophic accident. All of which prepares him to become a visionary city planner: New York must progress into the Future. Breen’s ascent up the intellectual and social ladder of early 20th-century Manhattan is a tale well told but also a pretext for author Felix Riesenberg (a ship’s captain, civil engineer, urban planner, adventurer turned novelist) to take Whitmanesque tours of the life worlds of New York–East Side, West Side, all around the town–spanning generations, social classes, ethnicities, technological advances, and cultural manias.

And amidst struggles, romances, and caffeinated digressions on subways, machine politics, World War I, and capital P Progress, there is…anatomy. Which John Breen first encounters in the form of an atlas with fold-out overlays of “the innermost recesses of the human body”. Taken with the diagrams, Breen innocently asks Pug, “How do they find all this out?” The hardboiled trainer replies, “they dissect stiffs—cut ‘em up, an’ fish out the guts,” and rails against “them that likes…to be butcherin’ dead floaters picked up in the river an’ sold to Bellevue for a dollar.” Anatomy isn’t pretty. A few pages later the point gains emphasis when, on a stroll up the Bowery, Breen happens upon “Fandyke’s Museum of Anatomy”: “a nauseous odor hung in the air” from “the many huge glass jars…containing specimens…the charts, the models, filled him with disgust.” And the museum’s main business, John discovers, is to lure men suffering from venereal diseases to get a $5 treatment from the proprietor “doctor.” Anatomy, death, sex, disease and grift all go together. Moments later, voluptuous Becka Lipvitch, who has a crush on John, turns up and teasingly wonders about the inside of the museum (which is “For Men Only”). Breen hurries her away. And the pay-off for readers in 1927? Titillation and nostalgia. The popular anatomical museum, once a part of the mosaic of old New York, was no longer.