Picturing Mr. Gray‘s Dissection Method: The Invention of an Iconography

By 1858 Henry Gray (1826-1861) and his illustrator Henry Vandyke Carter (1831-1897) got together and designed Gray’s Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical. The illustrations eschewed the use of Baroque and complex imagery and made the pictures schematic and precise with in situ labelling of structures without complicated arrows and proxy labels. Very soon the book became the most famous and popular text on anatomy on both sides of the Atlantic and it has been in print ever since. Gray’s became iconic not only over its textual style but over the Carter imagery which in the latest incarnations has now been abandoned. The new Gray’s under Susan Standring is a mix of gross anatomy, microscopic histology, pathology, molecular biology, 3D CGI imagery and CR-ROMS. As a result, Gray’s IS Anatomy.

 

But so little is known about Gray himself as he died from smallpox at the age of 34.

 

This podcast considers the formation of Gray’s book and the immediate aftermath following his death.