Matthew Baillie was the nephew and pupil of William Hunter, and together with William Cruikshank, assumed the directorship of Hunter's school in London on his uncle's death in 1783. The following year he performed the autopsy on Samuel Johnson. In 1787 he was appointed physician to St. George's Hospital, and two years later, in 1789, he was awarded his M.D. by Oxford. Baillie's The morbid anatomy of some of the most important parts of the human body, which first appeared in London in 1793, was the first systematic treatment on pathology in English, and offered a new approach to the understanding of disease by systematically describing the morbid appearance of each organ at autopsy, and correlating the findings with a full case history. Baillie classified lesions according to types - hardenings, softenings, thickenings, ulcerations, tumours, aneurysms, etc. He is accredited with the first accounts of several diseases, including cirrhosis, emphysema, and dermoid cysts of the ovaries. He also gave an excellent clinical description of stomach ulcers. The morbid anatomy was not illustrated. Baillie rectified this situation with the publication of A series of engravings, issued in ten fascicles between 1799 and 1802. The seventy-three plates were drawn from specimens in the John Hunter Museum by William Clift (1775-1849), the first curator of the museum, and engraved by William Skelton, James Basire and James Heath.