THE MAKING OF MR. GRAY’S ANATOMY
By Ruth Richardson
Oxford University Press, $29.95, 322 pages
Though it might come as a surprise to fans of the popular television series, “Grey’s Anatomy” (now in its fifth season on ABC), well over a century before neurosurgeon Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd (played by actor Patrick Dempsey) was wrestling with life-and-death consequences at the fictive Seattle Grace, the very real British anatomist, pathologist and surgeon Henry Gray was taking advantage of a new abundance of fresh corpses and an interested publisher to complete his iconic human anatomy textbook commonly known as “Gray’s Anatomy.”
The story of that book is the subject of Ruth Richardson’s gracefully written, richly detailed “The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy.” She begins by reminding readers that the book “many thousands — possibly millions — of medical students worldwide have used on their way to becoming doctors and surgeons” was the work of not one but two men: Henry Gray and Henry Vandyke Carter, “apothecary-surgeon, microscopist, physician and artist.” In her words, “Gray wrote the words, and Carter created the illustrations,” and from their collaboration a book was created that has “been in continuous publication ever since 1858.”
Ms. Richardson writes that “[i]ts publishing history has never been written, so the reasons for its uniqueness are neither properly understood nor appreciated.” She has built the narrative of her book focusing on the 1850s, “the decade between the Great Exhibition and the death of Prince Albert, to look at the first edition of Gray’s Anatomy from gestation to reviews. The nub of the story concerns the small constellation of individuals without whom there would have been no book.”
When the book appeared in 1858, it was immediately appreciated as something different from anything that had preceded it and soon became a best-seller. Ms. Richardson is particularly good at giving readers an appreciation of the mid-Victorian medical world and London’s burgeoning publishing industry. This was the world of Dickens between “A Christmas Carol” (1843) and “Great Expectations” (1860-61), and it was also the world where, until the passage of the Anatomy Act of 1832, hospitals were allowed to appropriate corpses for dissection and study once they had been left unclaimed for two days. Prior to that time, criminals could make money from anatomy schools willing to buy bodies bludgeoned, snatched and sold.
By the time the young Henry Gray, the ambitious physiologist, met Henry Carter, the shy, young illustrator with a deeply religious nature, the status of science, medicine and technology was well in flux. Readers are treated to glimpses into the well-heeled world of Belgravia in London and a knowledgeable tour of St. George’s Hospital, of which Ms. Richardson gives an able architectural and business accounting. However, the most appealing part of the book is the attention the author gives to the writing, illustrating, binding and publishing of the book itself. One could make the argument that the paucity of hard information about Henry Gray’s life is more than compensated for by the level of detail accorded the typesetters, wood engravers, steam printers, ink suppliers, paper folders, stitchers and bookbinders who brought his achievement to life.
And, while the sad fact remains that we simply don’t know much about Henry Gray, who died of smallpox at the age of 34, Ms. Richardson’s conjectures about the kind of man he was are plausible and compelling. In the case of Henry Carter, history has benefited from the fact that he kept a diary that, as much as any other document, allows readers to get a sense of the enormousness of the task he undertook and what it signified. The book benefits from ample illustrations, especially when they are compared to their less finely wrought competitors. But it is Ms. Richardson who must be credited for the monumental achievement she chronicles and illuminates, not the least for its humanity. She writes:
“There is a silence at the centre of Gray’s, as indeed there is in all anatomy books, which relates to the unutterable: a gap which no anatomist appears to address other than by turning away. It is the gap between the ostensible subject of the book and of the discipline, and the derivation of the bodies from whom its knowledge is constituted, its illustrations made. In Gray’s, the legally sanctioned bodies of people utterly alone in the metropolis were the raw material for dissections that served as the basis for illustrations, that were rendered in print as wood engravings. As mass-produced images, they have entered the brains of generations of the living — via the eyes, the minds, and the thoughts of those who have gazed at them.”
Entering the world of Ms. Richardson’s inquiry is to enter a world where art, science, the written word, the fragility and complexity of the human body collide. To gaze on the drawings and words of Gray and Carter is to experience genuine wonder. But Ms. Richardson has limned her story with enough human history that greed, competition, error and misjudgment can also be found here. Gray died too young. Carter lived to old age and after a bad marriage, forged a union that endured.
Of Gray’s work, Ms. Richardson writes: “Gray’s metaphors are functional and mechanical, architectural, structural, botanic and geographic — we have grooves, furrows and ridges, fissures and apertures, pivots, levers, branches and arches.” And we have this biography of a monumental book. As varied and suggestive as its subject, in its own way.
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