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 Talerelates one man's brush with the heady freedom of outlaws-and the price of returning to "civilization."