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By Root 973 0

This was almost exactly half my life ago. Aside from occasionally spell-checking anatomical terms while writing my two previous books, Sleep Demons and Five Quarts, I ended up using the book most often to ID parts on their way out: A good friend’s cancerous pancreas. My sister’s uterus, at the time of her partial hysterectomy. My boyfriend’s pituitary gland tumor. Being able to picture the affected organs helped put those surgeries into clearer focus. Gray’s Anatomy became like the list of emergency numbers taped next to the phone—good in a crisis. Whenever I used the book, its language, the opposite of lyrical, always impressed me; no detail seemed too small to be harpooned with a handful of finely honed sentences. Such occasions, though, were few and far between. Like my copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology, Gray’s mainly collected dust on a shelf.

One day a few years ago, however, I pulled it out to double-check a spelling, and as I paged through the text, the word in question slipped from my mental grasp and a new thought surfaced: Who wrote this thing?

I found nothing on the jacket flap but his first and last names, Henry Gray. There was no “About the Author” page in the back of the book. Curious, I checked an encyclopedia and other reference sources at home. Still nothing. Surely there must be a biography of the man, I thought, as I logged on to the public library’s online catalog. Alas, “No matches found.” So, too, said Amazon as well as those usually trusty procurers of the obscure, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, which struck me as odd. Gray’s Anatomy is widely considered one of the most famous books in the English language and is the only medical text most people know by name. Gray’s has been cited as a major influence by figures ranging from fitness icon Jack LaLanne to the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kiki Smith. Fascinating “biographies” have been written about everything from the number zero to the color mauve, yet there is not one on Gray. Can he simply have gone unnoticed by historians, been taken for granted, as he had by me till now?

Well, no, there was a far more reasonable explanation: when trying to piece together the life of Henry Gray, the unknowns simply outnumber the knowns. What I discovered through additional digging at local libraries, in fact, is that surviving records are more extensive about his father. Thomas Gray, born in Hampshire, England, in 1787, was a private messenger to King George IV, a position in which he was entrusted to carry the most sensitive of documents, including, one can assume, the love letters sent back and forth between George and Maria Anne Fitzherbert, the king’s secret, illegal, and Roman Catholic wife. Thomas Gray later served in the same capacity for George’s successor, William IV, which suggests that he possessed a remarkable ability to be discreet and inconspicuous—a trait that he seems to have passed on to his son. To this day, it is not known where or when exactly Henry Gray was born. The year 1825 has been suggested, but 1827 is generally more agreed upon. Similarly, where he spent his earliest years is uncertain. Some historians cite London while others suggest Windsor, England, while others, connecting imaginary dots, say the lad was raised in Windsor Castle, a commoner among royalty, which is an enchanting notion but nevertheless wrong. When Henry was around three years old, Thomas Gray moved his family—wife Ann and Henry and his three siblings—into a house near Buckingham Palace, but the address itself, No. 8 Wilton Street, is the only verifiable fact of his boyhood. It is almost as if Henry Gray did not fully exist as a flesh-and-blood being until the sixth of May 1845, the day he stepped inside London’s St. George’s Hospital and signed his name to the register as a medical student.

St. George’s Hospital

From this point forward, one can retrace his path by way of exams passed, awards won, and scientific papers published, all of which are noted in official records. Among the major milestones: Gray received the equivalent of an