Henry Gray, born in 1827, was already lecturing on anatomy at St. George’s Hospital Medical School in London by 1853, after award winning research on the endocrine glands and the spleen. In 1855 he asked illustrator Henry Vandyke Carter to help him make an anatomy textbook that students could afford and surgeons could use. For 18 months the two dissected unclaimed bodies from workhouses and hospital mortuaries, Gray isolating nerves and vessels while Carter drew them, work made possible by the Anatomy Act of 1832, which ended the reliance on resurrection men. Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical appeared in London in 1858 from John William Parker and Son, dedicated to Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, with a second edition in 1860.

In 1861 Gray treated a young nephew with smallpox. The boy survived, but Gray caught the virus and died at 34, a master of visible anatomy undone by an invisible pathogen. The book outlived him and split in two: Blanchard and Lea bought the American rights in 1862, and the US and British edition numbers drifted so far apart that the 30th British edition came out in 1949 and the 30th American edition in 1984. Later editions added histology, embryology, stem cells, and diagnostic radiology, swelling to 2,092 pages by the 38th edition.

• Why legal access to bodies let Gray and Carter work slowly and methodically
• The brief alignment of 1918, when both sides of the Atlantic released a 20th edition
• The 2015 41st edition’s sections on fluorescent microscopy and regenerative medicine
• Spin offs like Gray’s Anatomy for Students, created to restore the original goal of accessibility
• Susan Standring’s 39th edition, which reorganized the book from systemic to regional anatomy