Henry Gray

Henry Gray (1827 to 1861) was an English anatomist and surgeon best known for writing Gray's Anatomy. Born in Belgravia, London, he entered St. George's Hospital as a student in 1842 and was described as a painstaking worker who learned anatomy by making his own dissections. He won the triennial prize of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1848 for an essay on the nerves of the human eye, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at 25, and won the Astley Cooper prize in 1853 for a dissertation on the spleen. In 1858 he published the first edition of Anatomy, 750 pages with 363 figures drawn by his friend Henry Vandyke Carter, which is still published as an authoritative student textbook. He served as demonstrator of anatomy, curator of the museum and lecturer at St. George's, and died of smallpox in 1861 at the age of 34, apparently infected while nursing his nephew.