After apprenticing to a surgeon, John Bell attended lectures at the University of Edinburgh. In 1790 he opened an extra-mural school of anatomy and surgery, retiring in 1799 to enter private practice. To help him in his teaching, Bell compiled The anatomy of the bones, muscles, and joints (Edinburgh, 1793), which applied practical surgery to anatomy in simple language. He issued a volume of engravings to accompany this work, containing twenty-eight plates, drawn by Bell, and mostly engraved by him. The illustrations have the immediacy of drawings made in the dissection room, and some of them are a little gruesome (particularly the eleven plates of the muscle illustrations).