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