We see anatomy before we learn its language.
For over five decades, Dr. Anne Agur has stewarded that visual legacy; page by page, plate by plate, so the next pair of hands can see clearly enough to act. Open Grant’s Atlas and you're stepping into a lineage of image-making: carbon-dust bones with soft-edged shadows, leader lines that hit their mark, color placed just enough to guide the eye without overwhelming the mind. Her name is on the spine, but her legacy lives in the margins; where students underline, trace, and begin to understand.
At the University of Toronto, Agur has built a career teaching anatomy, mentoring students, and bridging basic science with clinical judgment since 1978. She recently became professor emeritus, but she’s still showing up to finish projects, guide grad students, and move forward. For her, it’s not an epilogue. It’s rhythm. And the rhythm is sustained by people.
You already know her work, whether you realize it or not. Open the 16th edition of Grant’s Atlas of Anatomy, co-authored with Arthur F. Dalley II, and you’ll see how carefully that legacy is maintained. The atlas was born in Toronto, and it trains hands across the world. As co-author with Keith L. Moore and Dalley on Essential Clinical Anatomy and later Clinically Oriented Anatomy, Agur helped shape how students meet structure with clinical purpose.
Those books don’t just require information; they’re built with craft. Agur still talks about the old carbon-dust illustrations stored in boxes, the meticulous airbrushing to erase leader lines and apply color, the eventual digitization that allowed depth and hue to work in harmony. It’s a story about precision. And about anatomists and artists sharing a table so learners can truly see. “The 3D is so important,” she says. “In order to dissect, you need the atlases to guide you.”
Her reach extends well beyond textbooks. Long before “integration” became a buzzword, Agur was running lab-based residency programs where small groups moved from dissection to clinical cases with physicians at their side. Otolaryngology, neurology, PM&R, each course built the same way: hands-on, anatomy as the scaffold for clinical judgment.
In research, she’s led teams that model anatomy in 3D to test real-world procedures: mapping muscle structure and innervation, overlaying injection pathways, calculating nerve-capture rates, and aligning ultrasound-guided techniques with what dissection actually shows. This is slow, technical, unglamorous work, but it moves. Findings move into clinics, into co-taught courses where surgeons, sonographers, and anatomists work from the same map. Agur doesn’t sugarcoat the grind. Clinical anatomical bench research is exacting. But it’s also how you earn a seat at the table, not as a footnote, but as a full partner.
Mentorship frames it all. For Agur, it’s reciprocal: “You’re always someone’s mentee,” she says. The goal isn’t to hand down answers, but to sharpen questions, widen perspective, and help students finish strong, and on time. That kind of mentorship doesn’t end at a defense. It becomes a long conversation, stretched across years, kept alive in lab meetings and conference hallways.
Within the AAA, Agur’s impact is everywhere. In workshops that bring education back to the center, in recognition that treats teaching as serious scholarship, and in the many cross-disciplinary mentors she’s cultivated. She received the Henry Gray Distinguished Educator Award in 2019, a recognition of all she had built, and a reminder to the members of the work still ahead: to keep shaping anatomy as rigorous science, vivid image, and deeply human story.
If there’s one lesson she hopes the field carries forward, it’s this: evidence. Evidence-based education. Evidence-informed anatomy. Evidence-driven advocacy; from the lab bench to the clinic to the policy meetings few of us choose but many must join. Hold the line on standards. Keep the bridges strong. And remember: the atlas matters not as a symbol on a shelf, but as a tool for hands learning to care.
Bring your first draft and your next question. Step into the lab, into the small group, into the margins, where a leader line becomes a structure, a structure becomes a decision, and a decision helps a patient. Dr. Anne Agur’s career is proof that anatomy moves. Through books. Through teams. Through people. Our job is to keep it moving.