The Body: A Guide for Occupants

by Bill Bryson

Henry Gray was a rising young demonstrator of anatomy at St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner in London (the building still stands but is now a luxury hotel) when he decided to produce a definitive and modern anatomical guide. Gray was still only in his twenties when he began work on the book in 1855. For the illustrations he commissioned a medical student at St George’s named Henry Vandyke Carter for a payment of £150 spread over fifteen months. Carter was painfully shy, but highly gifted. All of his illustrations had to be drawn in reverse so that they would print the right way around on paper, which must have been an almost unimaginable challenge.6 Carter not only did all 363 drawings, but also nearly all the dissecting and other preparatory work. Although many other anatomy books were available, Gray’s, in the words of one biographer, ‘eclipsed all others, partly for its meticulous detail, partly for its emphasis on surgical anatomy, but most of all perhaps for the excellence of the illustrations’.