Review: Nathan Gray's THE HUMAN REMAINS asks what medicine costs the people who practice it

Dr. Nathan A. Gray has spent most of his career now in palliative medicine, which means he spends most of his career with people who are dying. His debut graphic memoir, The Human Remains: Drawing Out Compassion in Medicine, is not really about them. It's about what seven years of medical training did to him before he got there — and it inverts the genre it belongs to in the process.

Graphic medicine, as a form, has mostly run in one direction: patients drawing their own chronic illness, their own experience of being dismissed or disbelieved by a system that treats them as a chart instead of a person. The Human Remains flips that lens onto the provider. Gray walks readers from the idealism that got him into medical school through the slow erosion of that idealism — the 30-hour shifts, the call rotations every fourth night, the pedagogical habit of stripping the "person" out of a patient in favor of pure physiology. One professor's lecture, rendered early in the book, does the thematic heavy lifting: students are taught to look past the human in front of them to "the broken parts within," and to understand putting on a white coat as becoming "something greater."

That line is the book's whole argument in miniature, and it's also where Chase M. Donaldson's essay on Kantian ethics in medical education becomes useful context rather than academic garnish. Donaldson traces how twentieth-century medicine's drift toward bureaucratic, corporate, and electronic-record-driven practice has measurably dehumanized the profession, and how medical ethics education has responded by leaning on principlism, the Georgetown four-principle framework of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Useful, but procedural. Kant's deontology cuts differently: obligations exist prior to outcomes, derived from reason rather than consequence, and it's specifically rational thought that Kant treats as the thing separating humans from mere animals — the source of inherent dignity.

To "look beyond the human before you," in Kantian terms, isn't just bad bedside manner. It's a transgression against the thing that makes the patient — and, Gray would add, the doctor — human in the first place.

That's the pivot The Human Remains makes that a lot of graphic medicine doesn't bother with: it treats the provider's dehumanization as the ethical failure, not just an occupational hazard. Gray's recurring dreams of dancing cadavers, inherited from anatomy class and never fully shaken, aren't played as horror-movie imagery. Instead, they're the residue of a training process that asks students to master the body while being punished, subtly, for still feeling something about it. His running bit about "Dissection Man" — a coping mechanism with, as he puts it, a stomach of steel — reads as gallows humor until you clock that he's using it to ask what it means that dissection wasn't a challenge for him but a threat.

I'll admit this section hit closer than I expected. I spent time in an ICU myself, in a coma, after a near-death experience. So, Gray's account of being trained to subtract the person from the physiology, to treat the body as a problem set rather than someone's whole life, is not an abstract critique for me. I was fully there, even unconscious. What brought me back wasn't a chart. It was my wife's presence, her insistence on my humanity when the clinical framework around me wasn't built to account for it.

Gray tells a parallel story in the book — newlyweds, a couple whose connection becomes the thing that breaks through the "pure physiology" model he'd been trained into — and I recognized it immediately. That's the moment the memoir earns its argument: the connection isn't a nice-to-have alongside the medicine. For a patient, it's sometimes the whole mechanism of care.

The book finds its resolution in palliative care, which Gray frames less as a subspecialty and more as the first place in his training that treated him with the humanity his education had trained him to withhold from patients. Visually, the memoir tracks this directly — the color palette shifts as the depression of training lifts and Gray reconnects with cartooning, with his family, with the version of himself that wanted to heal people rather than process them.

If there's a question The Human Remains leaves hanging for comics readers specifically, it's one about the form rather than the author: will a book aimed at interrogating medical pedagogy find the graphic-medicine audience it needs, or does it risk getting shelved as a doctor's memoir with illustrations? Early response, including comparisons to Fun Home-adjacent "graphic novel as serious literature" treatment, suggests it's landing as the former.

The Human Remains: Drawing Out Compassion in Medicine is out November 10, 2026, from Graphic Mundi.