Gray's Anatomy is spoken of in medical schools with hushed reverence, yet the man behind the name died at 34 before seeing any of its legacy. Henry Gray was born in Belgravia, London in 1827 and entered St George's Hospital as a medical student around 1842, at roughly 15 years old. This episode paints the visceral reality of 1840s medical training, where students avoided the unrefrigerated chaos of the dissection room, and shows how Gray ran toward it instead, insisting on making his own dissections to verify centuries of flawed anatomical knowledge muscle by muscle.

The results came fast. In 1848, still a student, he won the Royal College of Surgeons' triennial prize with an essay on the nerves of the eye that used comparative anatomy across vertebrate species. In 1852, at 25, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1853 he wo ...