John Collins Warren, the son of John Warren, one of the founders of Harvard Medical School and a leading Boston surgeon, studied abroad in London, Edinburgh, and Paris. In London he was a pupil of Sir Astley Cooper at Guy's Hospital. On returning to the U.S.A., he became a surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital on its opening in 1821. He was reputed to be one of the leading American surgeons of the first half of the nineteenth century. He also helped found the American Medical Association, and The New England journal of medicine and surgery. Anatomical description of the arteries was based on an anonymous manual for dissectors that appeared in London in 1808 under the title, Anatomical plates of the arteries of the human body. Warren reworked the text, improving the references to the plates, and adding some descriptions of the great arteries. The plates were copied from this work, and not from Haller's original text, by Josiah Foster Flagg, who was a dentist and pioneer of porcelain dentures, as well as being an accomplished medical illustrator. The fifteen illustrations were engraved on wood and printed in two colours to show the arteries in red against surrounding tissues in black. They were the first illustrations in colour to be published in the U.S.A.
