So, she makes the acquaintance of a "resurrection man," Jack Kerr. Outcast from the male dominated medical community - in an era where to advance and practice medicine, access to corpses is like a verboten currency - Hazel needs to discover another way to learn.
"Hazel sort of has grown up very lonely and isolated, and so she has the sort of the naivete that comes from privilege where she thinks, 'Well, yeah, of course, why couldn't I do these things that I want to do?' Because she hasn't had the reinforcement of society knocking her down again and again," Schwartz says. With basically no role models to emulate, or perhaps better to prevent her, she takes the bold initiative to pursue medicine. She's lost her father and brother and her mother has become reclusive. Hazel comes from a wealthy but isolated background and is trapped in a predetermined marriage to her cousin. Even though she is a strong woman who's more ambitious and pursuing a path that wouldn't have been considered socially acceptable for a woman at the time, it was really important to me that she still feel very grounded and not like a 2022 protagonist who has just been dropped into the 1800s," says Schwartz. "I really wanted to make Hazel feel like a woman of her time. It follows an independent young woman, Hazel Sinnett, who yearns to be a surgeon, but runs against the era's sexism in the medical community. The novel - which was recently named to Reese Witherspoon's YA Book Club - is set in Edinburgh, Scotland in the early 1800s. Basically, if 'Frankenstein' technology existed and was real, what other applications could it have and how might someone have discovered it in a different way with a different goal?" Schwartz says. "I had this idea inspired by 'Frankenstein' - the idea of putting together a human body and what that technology would look like. "Anatomy" is a (Mary) Shelley-esque nod to gothic literature, complete with grave robbing, tragic romance, premedieval medicine and its shady practitioners. The result of all that churning is her latest young adult novel, " Anatomy: A Love Story."
So, I've always sort of had that churning around in the back of my mind," she says. But there's also something romantic about the Enlightenment side of it and the dawn of modern scientific reason coming to the forefront.
"I've been fascinated with the macabre side of medical history my entire life, just the dawn of pre-anesthesia surgery and how kind of gruesome it was. Inspired by the castles and cobblestones, she tells WPR's " BETA" that this ideal European gothic backdrop inspired her to write a novel around her lifelong fascination on the early medical history of the era. When writer and humorist Dana Schwartz was 22, she visited Edinburgh, Scotland for the first time.
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