A Backward Glance for Tempus

摘要

In the past 17 years I have read and reviewed every issue of the Journal of Audiovisual Media in Medicine which had been published 25 years earlier so I feel that I got an insight into the history of medical illustration. An article by Carole Reeves was printed in 1980 on illustration of medicine in ancient Egypt in about 2800 BC (Reeves, 1980). Aristotle in Athens apparently used drawings for teaching anatomy about 370 BC, Leonardo de Vinci prepared a comprehensive series of drawings of the human figure in 1489 and Versalius published illustrations of the human body in de Humani Corporis Fabrico in 1543 (Donald, 1986). A major book of medical illustrations was published in England in 1858 entitled Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical. The text was written by Dr Henry Gray and the pen and ink drawings were by Dr Henry Vandyke Carter. The publishers wanted to record both names on the cover of the first edition but Dr Gray objected and the numerous editions published since have been known as Gray's Anatomy (Richardson, 2008).