Henry Gray
View a U.S.A. Hosp. Dept. marked copy of Gray's second edition in this
collection
Henry Gray (1827–1861) was an
English anatomist and surgeonOn
May 6, 1845, he entered as a student at St. George’s Hospital.
While still a student, he secured in 1848, the triennial prize of Royal
College of Surgeons 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 In 1852, at
the early age of twenty five, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal
Society for a dissertation ”On the structure and Use of Spleen ”.
In 1858 Gray published the first edition of his Anatomy. Henry
Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body, commonly shortened to Gray's Anatomy,
is an English language human anatomy textbook widely regarded as a
classic work on the subject, which covered 750 pages and contained 363
figures. He had the good fortune of securing the help of his friend Dr.
H V 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. A second edition was prepared by Gray and
published in 1860.
He held successively the posts of demonstrator of Anatomy, curator of
the museum, and Lecturer of Anatomy at St. George’s Hospital, and was in
1861 a candidate for the post of assistant surgeon. Unfortunately, he
was struck down by an attack of confluent smallpox., which he contracted
while looking after a nephew who was suffering from that disease and
died at the early age of thirty-four.
The Gray's Anatomy was one of the
Civil War medical books issued to the Union Army during the war by the
Surgeon General of the United States Army: Gray's Anatomy. Gray,
Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical.
(The personal edited research
notes of Michael Echols, the source of which may or
may not be completely documented)
