I did a ton of research on Lister, who is one of the founders of modern surgery, and Dr. I studied organic chemistry and anatomy in college, which I think gave me a good base of understanding. I thought I was gonna be a doctor because I thought no one makes their money as a writer, that’s not a job that a human being has. GR: What kind of research did you have to do, and what was that process like?ĭS: Weirdly enough, I was actually a pre-med in college. I wanted to set it early enough so that if anyone is really aware of the dates of history, they know that he’s a genius in this universe.
Beechum is this genius, and in this universe where he lives, he's making these advances a little faster than they actually happen. But I was able to think of that in terms of, OK, Dr. I actually make a few anachronistic changes-like, what is introduced as magical anesthesia is introduced a few decades earlier than it actually did historically. It was also a very interesting time in the history of surgery. It was also the year before the sale of bodies to medical professionals became obsolete, which meant that, at a certain point, that was not a viable career for anyone anymore, so I needed to keep that time period consistent. One, it’s the year that Mary Shelley first wrote Frankenstein, so that felt like a little Easter egg from me to me. There were a few reasons why I chose 1817. I got to spend a summer living there and writing there, which deepened my sense of the city and made it feel like a place where I could feasibly spend a book. I've been fascinated by Edinburgh's history ever since then, and then I was lucky enough to do a writing fellowship at a castle actually called Hawthorne Inn castle, which is why I named the Sinnett house that. It felt like…I mean, it felt like Harry Potter, like I was in a fantasy. Edinburgh was just the most amazing city I'd ever been to-the castles, the museums, the cobblestone streets. I didn't have a job yet, so I just took whatever money I had and backpacked through Europe. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity. GR: Why Edinburgh, and why 1817? How did you land on that location and time period?ĭS: I went to Edinburgh for the first time when I graduated college.
The story came together from all these threads, and then once I actually started typing, it felt like my fingers were faster than my brain. Like, I loved the history of Edinburgh, I loved grave robbers, I loved the history of surgery, and that's sort of how it came to be. And so I vision-boarded the elements of the story I wanted. I wanted a story that was set in that dark, mysterious world that has always fascinated and compelled me and ideally something that I would've wanted to read when I was a teenager. I was a typical Tumblr, My Chemical Romance–listening teen, and in recent years I've been writing this history podcast for iHeart radio called Noble Blood, and so I've always had this interest in history-and particularly European history. I feel like that influence is probably very obvious. Why is this the story that you wanted to write?ĭana Schwartz: I was thinking back on all of the books that I loved when I was a teenager growing up, and I loved stories that were kind of dark and weird. Goodreads: Talk a little bit about the inspiration behind the novel.
Goodreads contributor Taylor Bryant interviewed Schwartz about her research process for the book, writing for teens, and some of her favorite reads of 2021. “I didn't want anyone to distrust the vaccine in any way, and I didn't want anyone thinking I was making a subtle political statement.” “Originally, I had one character who was selling a quote-unquote cure for the Roman fever that turned out to be a scam, and I was like, ‘Oh, no, this is not the time for us not to trust doctors and this is not the time for fake cures,” she says. With Roman fever sweeping the city, bodies are plenty and Hazel has a lot of opportunities to practice on the dead and the living alike, but when some patients start showing up with mysterious wounds and zero memory of how they got them, she and Jack discover that the plague isn’t the only dark mystery sweeping the city.īecause of the unintended timely nature of the book, Schwartz divulges she did change one plot point during the revision process.
Beecham, she enlists the help of resurrection man Jack Currer. After she gets caught dressing in her late brother’s clothes to attend a boys-only anatomy class taught by her hero Dr. More broadly, the novel follows Hazel Sinnett on her undercover journey to becoming a surgeon. “Oh, boy, how relevant it became,” she says. When Dana Schwartz started writing about a 19th-century pandemic ravaging Edinburgh in her latest book, Anatomy: A Love Story, she had no idea that, three years later, she’d be living through her own.
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