Born into abject poverty in the British Empire, our narrator aspires to a better life as a ship's surgeon—until a tyrannical captain provokes a mutiny, forcing him into a life of piracy and eventually to a tropical commune of maroons called New Madagascar.

Told through a series of confessions to those who visit the narrator during his imprisonment at Marshalsea, The Anatomist's Tale relates one man's brush with the heady freedom of outlaws—and the price of returning to "civilization."