Gray's Anatomy 1858 – A Medical Book for the Ages

In his 1925 novel Arrowsmith, the American writer Sinclair Lewis wrote that three texts were important to a doctor's education: 

• The Bible
• Shakespeare's works 
• Gray's Anatomy 

Indeed, no medical book has matched the fame and longevity of Henry Gray's anatomy text. First published in 1858 as “Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical”, the book was officially renamed in 1938 as Gray's Anatomy.

When Henry Gray decided to produce a definitive modern anatomy textbook, he was a young teacher of practical anatomy at St. George's Hospital. He was still in his twenties when he began working on the book in 1855. Gray's Anatomy was published just three years after Henry Gray asked Henry Vandayke Carter, an exceptionally talented medical student and artist at St. George's, to produce the illustrations. The first color illustrations appeared in the 1887 edition. The book became an immediate bestseller. Although the illustrations were largely responsible for the fame of Gray's Anatomy, Carter received no income from the book. 

Unfortunately, Gray contracted smallpox and died at the age of 34, just before the second edition was published. Carter went to India in the year the book appeared, teaching anatomy and physiology at Grant Medical College and later becoming head of the department. He retired after spending thirty years in India and died of tuberculosis in 1897.

Today's readers should remember that Gray's Anatomy was written at a time when anesthesia and antibiotics did not yet exist and electric lights were not available to illuminate the taking of specimens or dissection.

It should also be remembered that the names of the poor men, women and children used for the illustrations in this book—one of the most widely used in medical history, and never out of print since its publication—will never be known.

About the Article Image: From left: Henry Gray; an illustration of the vertebral artery from the book “Anatomy of the Human Body” (1918 edition); and Harry Sinclair Lewis.

Historical Figures Mentioned in the Article: Henry Gray (1827–1861), Henry Vandyke Carter (1831–1897), Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951)

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