This article gives a systematic account of the activities of Ilya Buyalsky in the Department of Anatomy at the Imperial Medical and Surgical Academy in Saint Petersburg. It successively traces the key stages of his life at the academy: his first appointment as a prosector, the defence of his doctoral dissertation, his election as a full professor, and then as head of the department (after the retirement of Academician Pyotr Zagorsky), and his subsequent years of intensive and diverse research and teaching work.