Auteur: Henry Gray

Henry Gray [1827-1861] was an English anatomist and surgeon most notable for publishing the book Gray”s Anatomy. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) at the age of 25. Biography: Gray was born in Belgravia, London, in 1827 and lived most of his life in London. In 1842, he entered as a student at St. George”s Hospital, London (then situated in Belgravia, now moved to Tooting), and he is described by those who knew him as a most painstaking and methodical worker, and one who learned his anatomy by the slow but invaluable method of making dissections for himself. While still a student, Gray secured the triennial prize of Royal College of Surgeons in 1848 for an essay entitled The Origin, Connexions and Distribution of nerves to the human eye and its appendages, illustrated by comparative dissections of the eye in other vertebrate animals. In 1852, at the early age of 25, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in the following year he obtained the Astley Cooper prize of three hundred guineas for a dissertation On the structure and Use of Spleen. In 1858, Gray published the first edition of Anatomy, which covered 750 pages and contained 363 figures. He had the good fortune of securing the help of his friend Henry Vandyke Carter, a skilled draughtsman and formerly a demonstrator of anatomy at St. George”s Hospital. Carter made the drawings from which the engravings were executed, and the success of the book was, in the first instance, undoubtedly due in no small measure to the excellence of its illustrations. This edition was dedicated to Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, Bart, FRS, DCL. A second edition was prepared by Gray and published in 1860. The book is still published under the title Gray”s Anatomy and is widely appreciated as an extraordinary and authoritative textbook for medical students. Henry Gray wrote the original version of Gray”s Anatomy with an audience of medical students and physicians in mind, especially surgeons. For many decades however, precisely because Gray”s textbook became such a classic, successive editors made major efforts to preserve its position as possibly the most authoritative text on the subject in English. Toward this end, a long-term strategy appears to have been to make each edition come close to containing a fully comprehensive account of the anatomical medical understanding available at the time of publication. Given the explosion of medical knowledge in the 20th century, it is easily appreciated that this led to a vast expansion of the book, which threatened to collapse under its own weight in a metaphorical and physical sense.