The Making of Mr. Gray's Anatomy: Biography of a Medical Textbook

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a brief autobiography in the first person in the voice of a particular mirror which had once reflected the face of Henry James ("Mirror Speaks"). For Thomas Hardy, too, a favorite literary genre was that which concerns itself with the lives of objects. He wrote a fine poem about the resonances of old furniture, "I see the hands of the generations. . . . / In play on its knobs and indentations" (" Old Furniture") and another on the ongoing life of the Titanic's hulk on the ocean floor after its convergence with the iceberg, its once brilliant mirrors "bleared and black and blind" ("Convergence"). He wrote, too, of a tree which folded within its own being the essences of the dead inhabitants of the churchyard from which it drew its sustenance: "Portion of this yew / Is a man my grandsire knew" ("Transformations"). Both writers understood that things embody lives.

The perception was not unique to the late Victorian era: in the eighteenth century there were novels about a bank-note, a coat, a hackney coach, a watch.¹ Coins were particularly useful.² These were objects that could circulate at different levels of society, and which could be thought of as inconspicuous observers of—even participants in—all sorts of human predicaments. This literary form is known as the "novel of circulation," or as the "it-narrative" (Douglas and Blackwell).

It is evident from these stories, as it is from our own attachments to things, that no material object comes from nowhere, not even a meteorite. Even inanimate objects have a past; a provenance; and therefore, in a sense, a biography. Sometimes supporting documentation, oral testimony, or even scientific analysis allows access to genuine factual data, but even when this is missing, in the hands of a storyteller the past of an object can nevertheless be imagined and narrated. In a sense, my book The Making of Mr. Gray's Anatomy is an it-biography. The scholarly work of creating it has taken as its starting point a real book: a material object, a mass-produced three-dimensional solid, and then has gathered and presented what may reliably be said about it. From the documentation that has survived—preserved in archives all over the country by behind-the-scenes workers, archivists, and librarians—I have been able to assemble, comprehend, and imagine its past. I have grown to perceive the great textbook both as the product of multiple working lives and as itself possessing a sort of secondary life-form.

The affinities with a human life-cycle in the biography of this book are intriguing:

• • Its conception is doubtful, insofar it is not known who originally had the idea for such a book, but we do know that it was first mooted between the author and the illustrator in London, in late November 1855.

• • Its parentage is known: both author and illustrator are identifiable, and its extended family—the publishers, wood engravers, printers—are all traceable in existing records.

• • Its gestation occurred between 1855-1857, while the dissections, illustrations, and textual drafting were done.

• • The book had a difficult labor, but its birth was in time for the opening of the medical school year in autumn of 1858, and its timely arrival was announced in The Lancet and elsewhere in the medical press.

• • During its youth, the book underwent the usual teething problems (reviews) and passed its growth milestones in terms of sales, impact, and increasing familiarity in the marketplace.

• • It was orphaned at an early age—within three years of its first publication, the book's illustrator emigrated to India, its young publisher died, and then its author. But step-parents stood in—a new editor and a new publisher—ensuring its survival.

• • It has since had a long life—one hundred and fifty years so far, during which time it has become fondly known as "The Doctor's Bible." It would also be true to say that latterly, obesity has become a problem.

• • In terms of progeny, it has had forty editions so far in the UK alone—each...