100 Gray Years

London Surgeon Henry Gray, who died at 34 in 1861, won immortality with a book. Last week his Gray's Anatomy celebrated its looth birthday with a fat new centenary issue that made young Dr. Gray look more alive than ever. Medical students round the world have for generations hefted Gray's weight (now 6 Ibs. 4 oz.), painfully leafed his pages (now 1,604) and paid his price (now $18) in order to learn what Gray taught himself. :

Gray never went to medical school, but at 23 he had picked up enough dissecting skill to become house surgeon at London's St. George's Hospital. At 25 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, spent the next six years putting together his book "to furnish the student and the practitioner with an accurate view of the anatomy of the human body."

With Gray's own lucid structure and fine woodcuts by his hospital colleague, Dr. Henry Vandyke Carter, the first 750-page (3 Ibs. 4 oz.) edition was a medical bestseller. The British Medical Journal quickly called it "The manual of anatomy," and it soon outsold the much-higher-priced standard work. Quain's Anatomical Plates.

Gray died of smallpox, contracted after treating it in his small nephew. But the book had already given him the fame of a far older man. Today platoons of top physician-editors preside over every new edition, and like every healthy institution, it has markedly changed through the years. Gray might not recognize much of himself in the new British 32nd edition, but the structure is the same. The way Dr. Gray looked at the human body simply cannot be beaten.

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