Gray's Anatomy

Henry Gray, 28, of St George's Hospital in London, planned in 1855 a new textbook for students and surgeons. For the pictures he turned to Henry Vandyke Carter, 24, a fellow St George's man with a gift for anatomical drawing. The two had first met in the St George's dissecting room around 1848. They dissected together for at least 18 months and worked through 1856 and 1857.

Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical came out from John W. Parker and Son in August 1858, in a first printing of 2,000 copies. The preface stated the aim plainly: to apply anatomy to practical surgery. Under each section, in small type, came notes on why exact knowledge of that part mattered in an operation or a fracture. The 363 engravings were cut by Butterworth and Heath. Carter made every drawing, the preface said, most of them from or checked against the joint dissections, though some plates, such as the lymphatics after Mascagni, were copied from older works. Most of the drawings carried the names of the structures on the figure itself, unusual in textbooks of the time. The title page credited Carter with the drawings and with a share in the dissections, in type smaller than Gray's name. A Philadelphia edition followed in 1859.

The money went mostly to Gray. He had a royalty of £150 on every 1,000 copies sold; Carter was paid a single fee of £150. Carter left for India, where he became professor of anatomy at Grant Medical College in Bombay. Gray published a second edition in 1860. In 1861 he caught smallpox from his nephew and died on 13 June, aged 34.

The book kept his name. By the 17th edition, of 1909, Carter's name had been dropped from it altogether. In 2015 it was going into its 41st edition.