The Human Remains : Drawing Out Compassion in Medicine

A graphic memoir of one doctor’s journey through clinical training and his return to the human side of care. Under the fluorescent lights of the anatomy lab, a first-year medical student makes his opening incision into a donor’s body and embarks on a profession that will ask more of him than he can imagine. The Human Remains is a graphic memoir about what medical training takes and what it might give back. In spare, unflinching panels, Dr. Nathan A. Gray traces his path from an anxious student with a scalpel to an exhausted resident to a physician able to sit with his patients’ suffering. Raised in a family of doctors, he entered medicine believing that it was his calling. What he encountered instead was a culture of endurance—sleep deprivation, the depersonalizing churn of patient care, and a steady drift away from the ideals that first drew him in. At each stage of his training, he found himself promising that he would be kinder, more human, different. Not all of those promises were kept. The turning point for Dr. Gray came in palliative care, a specialty that taught him to weave the science of medicine into each person’s particular story of suffering, meaning, and mortality. There, he rediscovered the possibility of practicing medicine without losing sight of the human being before him. Honest, searching, and at times darkly funny, The Human Remains is a meditation on the fragile work of becoming a doctor who can still feel.