“John-o is interested in cutting up whatever he finds at the limits of life”

This chapter examines the depiction in two twentieth-century British novels – Hilary Mantel's The Giant, O'Brien and Alasdair Gray's Poor Things. It also examines the novels' evocation of the role of monstrous specimens in the history of anatomical constructions of the human body. The chapter considers how the use of "abnormal bodies" foregrounds medicine's deeper struggles to demonstrate an exemplary form of human embodiment through morbid anatomy. It focuses on Mantel's and Gray's depictions of the intersection of medicine's production of a norm of human embodiment with the political, legal and social abandonment of those considered ambiguously human. The chapter also focuses on the Anatomy Act and on the conflation of monstrosity with other experiences of social exclusion, including poverty. It describes work from the critical medical humanities to explore Mantel's and Gray's emphasis on the entanglement of literary and biomedical imaginations of the human.