Illustrating Medicine: Line, Luminance and the Lessons from J.C.B. Grant’s Atlas of Anatomy (1943)

The onset of the Second World War created a temporary crisis in the North American medical community when the supply of medical textbooks from Europe, used to train physicians and surgeons, was threatened. In 1941, Dr J.C.B. Grant of the University of Toronto proposed a new anatomical atlas, comprising both tonal and line drawings, to address this need. In this visual essay, the authors briefly illustrate Grant’s method for creating these drawings, and his systematic and deliberate use of photography in the process. They explain the reasons for Grant’s use of black and white images, and examine the specific illustration techniques used by these artists. A series of close-ups of the original drawings produced for the Atlas in the 1940s highlight the visual communication strategies deployed by these skilled illustrators. In so doing, they make an argument for the importance of examining how images are produced for medical publication, and not merely examining what is produced.