With over 2000 pages of text and 726 lithographed plates (incorporating 3604 individual figures), this work is the most comprehensive, and perhaps the most beautiful anatomical surgical atlas of the 19th century. It was published in parts over 23 years and represented the life work of Bourgery, who died before completion. Some copies were issued with the plates in black and white at half the price of the colored copies. The black and white images lack much of the visual drama of the hand-colored plates.

The artist who directed the massive program of prosection, and who was responsible for 512 of the spectacular illustrations, was Nicholas-Henri Jacob, a student of the neo-classical painter of the French Revolution, Jacques-Louis David. Bourgery considered Jacob his full collaborator in the project. The influence of the highly finished style of David is evident in the plates for this work. Before embarking on this project Jacob had gained considerable experience drawing on stone for lithographic publications. Jacob's artistic collaborators on the project were his wife, Charlotte Hublier-Jacob, Lean Baptiste Leveillé, Edmond Pochet, E. Roussin, and others. The physiologist Claude Bernard did dissections and anatomical preparations for only two of the images and a few captions. Bernard played a somewhat greater editorial role in the slightly expanded second edition published from 1866 to 1871. For both versions the precisely-detailed hand-coloring was done by an elaborate system of stencils; otherwise the time involved in the intricate hand-coloring of all the large plates might have made the edition impossible.

The first two volumes were translated into English and issued in Paris by Delaunay in 1833 and 1837. Before this English edition was terminated the publisher also issued a fragment of volume 4. Presumably only a small number of copies of the English version were issued, as relatively few have survived as compared to the original French edition.

All the plates were reproduced in color in a modern single-volume tri-lingual folio edition: Bourgery et Jacob, Atlas of human anatomy and surgery, edited by Jean Marie Le Minor and Henri Sick (Cologne: Taschen, 2005).