The Making of Mr Gray's Anatomy: Bodies, Books, Fortune, Fame by Ruth Richardson

This is the story of how the young and ambitious Mr Henry Gray and the talented, diffident Mr Henry Vandyke Carter, created the 'Doctor's Bible'.

In Ruth Richardson's vivid account of the making of Gray's Anatomy, we encounter too the publishers, the wood engravers whose craft would soon vanish, the printers, and even the women who folded and stitched together the book's pages. The book was rooted in the heart of the Empire: ranging across the elegant terraces and cluttered backstreets of London from Belgravia to the City. Here we read about microscopy, medical fame, commerce, destitution, disease - and, not least, spirited from the workhouses and mortuaries of London, the unnamed dead, whose corpses provided the material for Carter's drawings, which were to make Gray's book famous throughout the world.

Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Number of Pages: 344
ISBN: 9780199570287