Nottingham. 1817. The body-snatcher John Macreadie has been banished to this northern outpost to find fodder for Ben Crouch's resurrection business. Macreadie and his young assistant, Jack Pegg, dip up the town's newly dead at night and ship the bodies north. Edinburgh's surgeons are every bit as ravenous as London's.
The assistant surgeon James Hammond feels like a foreigner in this small, northern hospital, mainly because he hails from London, where he trained under some of England's most innovative surgeons. As in London, he performs dissections of newly deceased patients whenever possible. Dissections are scorned by several hospital Board members and the families of some patients. For them, dissections are nothing more than butchering the dead, but Hammond is undeterred, for he believes that only by studying anatomy through dissecting will the science of surgery advance.
When Hammond undertakes a daring procedure, his superior, Augustus Killmaster, begins to resent his assistant surgeon's looks, his training, and his confidence. Killmaster and his friend, Walter Ewebank, plot to get rid of the young, southern upstart. After Killmaster nicks himself during a dissection, Hammond briefly becomes notorious. He never imagined that his drive to understand human anatomy through dissection would spark such shocking repercussions.