The signal visual characteristic that marks the extensive and profound professionalization of the sciences and technologies in the nineteenth century is the progressive dominance of a style of representation that deliberately eschews stylishness.

What I am calling the ‘non-style’ — a technical mode of illustration in which the dry imparting of information is the sole conscious focus — arrived in different disciplines at different times. Engineering drawing around 1800, especially in France, played a pioneering role. By 1850, there was no branch of institutionalized science that remained untouched, and much twentieth-century illustration is its direct heir.

The transformation was particularly conspicuous in medical illustration. The portrayal of the human body, diseased, deformed or dissected, had always been a fraught business. A heroic mode of illustration displaying elegant figures in brave postures with decorous adornments in gracious settings became the favoured presentation in the erudite humanist picture-books of anatomy, from Andreas Vesalius and Charles Estienne in the Renaissance to Bernhard Siegfried Albinus in the Enlightenment. Such volumes, grand in format, expensive to produce, and often sold by subscription, were hardly the stuff of routine teaching.

Henry Gray's Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical: the first edition of 1858. Credit: WELLCOME INSTITUTE LIBRARY, LONDON

The rise of the professional medical school in the nineteenth century did not signal the immediate end of the picture-book, but it did mark the growing domination of the plain, technical textbook, epitomized by Henry Gray's Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical, which, as Gray's Anatomy, established itself as the anatomical bible for generations of students required to ‘name the parts’. First published in 1858, bound in business-like brown buckram, it achieved an awesome degree of abstinence, and bids fair to be the most remorselessly unexciting book ever written on an engaging subject.

It begins with no eloquent preface, extolling the ethical worth of dissection to reveal the wonders of bodily mechanisms. Instead, it plunges almost immediately in medias res with osteological descriptions. And, having finished his even-pace survey with the recto-vesical fascia, Gray's only conclusion is a 30-page index.

The 363 plates in the lucidly descriptive text are by the pictorially named Henry Vandyke Carter, displaying the parts of the body (all parts and no wholes) in sober, matter-of-fact line illustrations. The woodcut technique is used to achieve a single, consistent level of unseductive description, the register of which is unwavering throughout the book. The plainness is all the more striking when Gray draws directly on the work of his stylish predecessors — debts that are acknowledged in his captions.

Henry Vandyke Carter's “Lymphatics of the Upper Extremity”, from Henry Gray's Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical, 1858. Credit: WELLCOME INSTITUTE LIBRARY, LONDON

A striking case in point is his use of Paolo Mascagni's Vasorum Lymphaticorum Corporis Humani(1787). Now famed for his grandiose project for a life-sized human anatomy in three great folios, Mascagni illustrated the lymphatics with vivid pictorial effects in strikingly arranged figures, limbs and organs. Gray took over a few vestiges of Mascagni's pictorial tendencies, but his linear style drains the illustrations of any visual effects that did not serve his rigorously didactic aims.

Whereas Mascagni's large-scale copper engravings demonstrate vessels and glands in three dimensions, modelled in light and shade, Gray's small woodcuts map the course of the lymphatics in a manner that stands in an intermediate position between a naturalistic picture and a conventional diagram. Such mapping serves to guide the student in dissection and memorizing, in much the same way that a terrestrial map helps us to plot and memorize our way around a city.

Gray's sterling sobriety survived more or less unscathed through many editions. Photography, sectional anatomy (which developed to a point of considerable sophistication in the second half of the last century), microscopy and, later, X-rays were all long resisted. Gradually, during the course of this century, successive editors have introduced a fresh battery of illustrative techniques, including state-of-the-art microscopy and, inevitably, the latest in computer graphics. Between the brightly coloured covers of the present edition (the 38th), the only consistent visual characteristic that can be discerned is a cacophony of styles and registers of communication. It is most unlikely that Gray would have approved.