Maclise, younger brother of the artist Daniel Maclise, was born in Cork. He studied anatomy under Richard Quain at University College, London, and contributed to the latter's The anatomy of the arteries. In 1851 he published his own volume of thirty-five lithographic plates, many of them hand-coloured. A second edition appeared in 1856, with some plates re-drawn, and seventeen new ones added. An edition published in Philadelphia in 1859 contained sixty-eight plates. The illustrations to Surgical anatomy were drawn by Maclise from his own dissections performed at University College and at the school of anatomy attached to L'Hôpital de la Pitié in Paris. The dissected figures seem almost life-like, with real faces, usually of young men with fair hair. Endowed with great dignity, the figures resemble the romantically noble heroic figures in his brother's paintings (plates 1-10). The plates were lithographed by Michael and Nicholas Hanhart. Maclise also published On dislocations and fractures in 1859, which included thirty-five plates.
