Dissection: A Novel

This first novel by a retired professor of medicine is a must read for anyone interested in medical crime and their own bodies. The tale follows a second year medical resident who stumbles on an overly cozy relationship between a medical device manufacturer and one of her husband’s surgical training program mentors while she is researching a talk to her fellow residents. With help from a tech-literate immigrant hospital librarian, an eccentric morgue deiner and the bird-loving chief of the supply department she gradually untangles the mischief only to be confronted by the perpetrator as she discovers crucial evidence. The tale’s ironic denouement surprises even its heroine.

Just as readers of historical novels come to better understand a previous era, readers of Dissection come to understand some of the miraculous workings of their own anatomy and physiology. A detailed illustration from the 100th edition of Gray’s Textbook of Anatomy serves as a frontispiece map to which the reader can return as the story proceeds and each of the novel’s chapters begins with a brief quote from Gray’s describing in eloquent yet precise terms a portion of human anatomy relevant to the subsequent chapter.

Robert Peter Mogielnicki, M.D. is a Dartmouth (now Geisel) Medical School Professor of Medicine emeritus who was drawn away from New Hampshire to Portland Oregon by the pull of his children and grandchildren. Most of his previous publications have been in the professional medical literature with a recent foray into personal essays on his blog at Cereflections. Dissection is his first attempt at fiction and has been in the works for the past 5 years.