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All auctions / Books, Maps & Manuscripts / Gray's Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical, 1878 Henry C. Lea Philadelphia
North America, United States, Philadelphia. A thick octavo of Victorian medicine, Henry Gray's "Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical," issued at Philadelphia by Henry C. Lea in 1878. The volume is bound in half leather over paper-covered boards, the spine ruled into compartments by raised bands and carrying a dark gilt-lettered label reading GRAY'S ANATOMY DESCRIPTIVE AND SURGICAL. Within, Gray's systematic survey of bone, muscle, vessel, and nerve is carried by the wood-engraved figures drawn by Henry Vandyke Carter, whose labels were set directly onto the structures they name, a device that made the book legible at the dissecting table and secured its dominance in Anglo-American medical teaching. American editions such as this Lea issue were the working texts of a generation of surgeons. Henry Gray (1827-1861) was a demonstrator of anatomy at St. George's Hospital, London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society by the age of twenty-five. He conceived the Anatomy as an affordable, practical student text; the first London edition appeared in 1858, and Gray died of smallpox three years later, at thirty-four, having seen only two editions through the press. His collaborator Henry Vandyke Carter, a physician and anatomist in his own right, produced the roughly 363 original drawings and was paid a flat fee, his name set in smaller type than Gray's on the title page, a slight that has occupied historians of the book ever since. The American line of the work began with Blanchard and Lea in 1859 and passed through the Lea firm across the later nineteenth century, each new edition revised by American editors to keep pace with surgical practice. The 1878 printing belongs to this period of continuous revision, when the Anatomy had already become the standard on both sides of the Atlantic, and it remains the longest continuously published medical text in English. Item # 205010
Estimate:$50
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorBooks, Maps & Manuscripts
Estimate:
$50
Codex Aureus of Echternach facsimile edition with a reproduction of
04/16/2026
$2,560
Est: $2,000
Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed nowCodex Aureus of Echternach facsimile edition with a reproduction of
04/16/2026
$2,560
Est: $2,000
