Hunter originally trained as Smellie’s assistant. Once he achieved brilliant professional and financial success he became a great collector of rare books and manuscripts, coins, paintings, minerals, shells, and antiquities. Reflecting Hunter’s interests in anatomical art and fine printing, this work contains 34 copper plates depicting the gravid uterus, life-size. It is William Hunter’s best work and one of the finest anatomical atlases ever produced, “anatomically exact and artistically perfect” (Choulant). Except for J. Dalby’s little book, Virtues of cinnabar and musk against the bite of a mad dog, 1762, Hunter's atlas is the only medical publication produced by the famous Baskerville Press. The letterpress is in both Latin and English. The plates were engraved by several artists from drawings by Jan van Rymsdyk, the original sepia drawings for which are preserved in the Hunterian Collection at the University of Glasgow Library. In 1851 The Sydenham Society published a reprint of the atias. See J. L. Thornton’s Jan van Rymsdyk, medical artist of the eighteenth century, Cambridge: Oleander Press, 1982.