Sarah Wise
On the Slab
The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy: Bodies, Books, Fortune, Fame
By Ruth Richardson
Oxford University Press 288pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Gray’s Anatomy was 150 years old this summer, and the fortieth edition is about to roll off the presses. Its original publication marked a quiet revolution in medical textbooks – with all the flab of wordy text, confusingly sited captions, windy footnotes and over-elaborate illustrations pared away to leave an unprecedentedly helpful (and affordable) student’s guide to the human body.
In writing a biography of this book, Ruth Richardson is refreshingly honest about the challenges posed to her by fugitive documentation: whatever was committed to paper by and about young Henry Gray has for the most part gone missing, and she admits that many of her conclusions have ‘been arrived
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger