The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy (13 page)

After four weeks back in town, he earned his first fee, £4.7s for several days’ drawing for a Dr. Heale, an encouraging amount. Heale offered additional work, as did Gray, but already Carter was growing restless. “[I] am constantly feeling want of fixed and full employment.” He was not willing, however, to take just any job.

Twice, he is offered a full-time “assistancy” position, the kind of entry-level job most freshly minted doctors had to take, and he turns them down. One offer had actually been forwarded by his father from a medical practice in Scarborough, no doubt along with a fatherly nudge. “Hardly know how to treat offer,” he writes, showing a moment’s hesitation before again standing firm: “I am fit for a higher office.” Of course, I know that he knows that he still has a dream job in mind. Carter remains hopeful for a berth on a steamship.

One day in early March, he stops by the London office of the General Screw Steamship Company. Though his name has apparently been “on the list” for an interview since the previous October, “appointments are slow,” he is told. But this does not sit well with an eager young man. After weeks of forced patience, Carter writes a letter to the company’s chief officer, asserting his earnest “desire to enter service.” He posts the letter on the nineteenth of March, the very same day, coincidentally, that an ad he had purchased appears in the distinguished medical journal
The Lancet.

Medical Artist.—A young gentleman,
M.R.C.S., and acquainted with Pathology, the Microscope, &c., is desirous of assisting gentlemen engaged in scientific research by making Drawings. Specimens will be furnished on address to H.V.C., No. 85, Upper Ebury-street, Pimlico.

This was his calling card, presented on the newsprint equivalent of a silver platter, to the entire medical community of London. He had fussed over each word, checked the proof for typos, and when the ad came out, pasted a neatly clipped copy into that day’s diary entry. For him, the nineteenth was a day to imagine, and savor, all the fantastic possibilities ahead—the flood of responses to his ad, the encouraging reply from the steamship company, the subsequent interview and job offer, his first journey out to India, and on and on. The future looked bright. With the turn of a page, however, come the gray clouds. The steamship company informs Carter that his “age and inexperience” make him an unsuitable candidate for a ship’s surgency. Adding to his disappointment, it soon becomes clear that
The Lancet
ad fails to generate any new work. But why? Was the advert too genteel?

Carter doesn’t give up but rather changes focus. He now sets his sights squarely on a Studentship in Human and Comparative Anatomy offered by the Royal College of Surgeons. This was essentially a full-time internship of two years’ duration and was awarded every June to the winner of a highly competitive qualifying exam. This meant he had just over two months to prepare.

Already licensed to practice surgery, he was not lacking in impressive academic honors and credentials. In fact, he had returned from Paris with six new “certificates” attesting to the specialized work he had done in hospitals there. And the studentship would not give him the kind of on-the-job experience the General Screw Company thought he was lacking. One could even argue that the position would be a step backward for him. Indeed, while casting this last line of thought, I believe I found the likeliest explanation. The previous June, just a few weeks after earning his M.R.C.S., Carter had come in second in the studentship exam—so close!—but second place got you nothing, not even a certificate. This time around, he would redeem himself and claim the crown.

And June 14 was the day. “
I
was called in, as [the] successful candidate for [the] Studentship of Anatomy to [the] College!” he tells his diary, skipping his articles in his excitement.

One of the very next to hear the news was Henry Gray, whom Carter visited at work. Not only pleased for his friend, Gray offered further encouragement, suggesting that he now go for the Royal College of Surgeons’ Triennial Prize. Gray himself had won this award four years earlier for his study of the nerves of the human eye.
You’ll have access to the lab and the library, so why not do some independent research?

“Might—shall see,” Carter notes, and his reluctance is understandable. This would be a major undertaking, requiring an effort comparable to a master’s-level dissertation, and he has already got a lot on his plate with the upcoming M.B. (bachelor of medicine) exam. (He must pass the M.B. before then working toward his final accreditation, the M.D.) Carter being Carter, I am sure he was just worrying about surviving his first day on the job, whereas Gray, also true to form, was thinking years ahead.

They pick up the same conversation several days after Carter has begun the studentship, and this time, the subtext is much clearer. Perhaps Gray knows that the position won’t be as challenging as Carter might want and, knowing his friend as well as he does, believes he needs a fixed goal to work toward. Gray presents his concern in “a considerate and encouraging way,” but Carter is still in wait-and-see mode.

Already, though, Gray seems to be right. Over the previous six days, Carter had done nothing beyond a little dissecting and had yet to even see Mr. Queckett, the professor he was meant to assist. One person he had not been able to avoid, however, was an insufferable chap named Sylvester, the first-place winner in last year’s exam. Now the senior student to Carter’s junior, Sylvester sounds like the anti-Gray. “Hasty and spiteful,” he had made nasty little digs at Carter, telling him, for instance, that the dissections he had done for the exam were inferior to another candidate’s.

Making an uncomfortable situation worse, Carter is under the impression that Caesar Hawkins and the other higher-ups at St. George’s are upset with him for taking a studentship at what is essentially a competing school. But this is sheer poppycock, as Lily might say, another instance of Carter’s letting a neurotic sense of propriety get the better of him. Henry Gray, to whom he turns for counsel, assures him likewise.

Always there to buck him up, Gray is the ever-friendly port in a storm, whether said storm is imagined or not. He makes everything seem, well, not easy by any means, but
within reach,
so long as one works hard. To someone as impressionable as Carter, however, there is a clear distinction between an everyday role model and a paragon, a being kissed by destiny, and, as of July 25, 1853, Henry Gray appears to have crossed over. Of his friend, Carter writes that evening, “Gray got [the] Astley Cooper prize—beating good men.” He seems a bit incredulous, as if thinking,
How
does
Gray do it?
“Clever fellow,” he cannot help but marvel.

Along with the £300 cash prize, Gray would be accorded an even greater reward. His treatise on the spleen had attracted the attention of a London publisher who would release it as a book the following year. In a small way, Carter shares in this victory because, of course, he had created the illustrations for the project.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t hear the good news from Gray himself, for Gray has been “down in [the] country—[He] has been very
ill
.” Ill with what, and how serious the affliction, Carter does not say, but, as I’ve learned through St. George’s administrative records, Gray’s illness was serious enough that he requested a leave of absence from his curator duties. Further, he arranged to defer receipt of the Astley Cooper Prize until he had recuperated.

Hardly two weeks pass before Carter loses another anchor in his life, his brother and roommate Joe, who suddenly falls ill and is bundled off to recuperate in Hull, with the boys’ aunt, uncle, and grandfather. “Somewhat alarmed—choleric symptoms,” he jots that night in his diary.

Joe, now eighteen, had rejoined H.V. upon his return from Paris to continue studying art, and the two shared expenses. “Joe and I get on pretty well,” H.V. told Lily in a letter from February 1853, but then backpedaled. “His malpleasantries, however, stick to him like pitch and make me too sharp perhaps.”

Perhaps?
Lily surely got a giggle out of that. H.V. and Joe, polar opposites, annoyed the hell out of each other in a way only brothers who love each other can. Joe was free-spirited and fun-loving and did not seem to have a religious bone in his body. Mostly, what was on his mind was girls, at least from his older brother’s perspective. As H.V. once commented to Lily, half in jest, “Joey’s love for the young ladies is still as strong as ever, but I should like to know how he intends to support his wives.”

While finding Joe “certainly very exasperating occasionally,” H.V. also saw great artistic potential. The two often visited galleries and museums together, sharing in the splendid works in the royal collections—paintings by Titian, Turner, and H.V.’s namesake, Van Dyck, among others. What’s more, just as their father had a penchant for giving impromptu art lessons, H.V. had taken it upon himself to give his brother “anatomical lessons,” believing that a solid grasp of human anatomy was essential to Joe’s education. “He won’t make a good anatomist,” Carter reported dryly to Lily after one such lesson, but that their little brother would one day be known as a great artist, he seemed to have little doubt.

And now that he was gone, H.V. missed him terribly.

“Feel very dull without Joe,” he admits to himself—and to an empty apartment—after ten days on his own.

By the end of September, Henry Gray was back in town—and back to his old self. Within days, he had offered Carter a new challenge, asking him to create two drawings of a size and complexity he had never attempted. These huge drawings of the chest would be used in the classroom at St. George’s, where Gray was now in his second session as lecturer of Practical Anatomy.

Carter agreed to the assignment, though not without private reservations. Rather than feeling idle, he now had the opposite problem: “Am too copious in plans,” as he puts it, and that’s putting it mildly. On top of rebottling hundreds of specimens at the college and helping Mr. Queckett prepare his histology lectures, he must squeeze in time to study for the M.B.’s. But at least he’s busy. He really is happiest when he’s busy—or, to be more precise, when he doesn’t have time to be
un
happy. Before he has even finished the drawings, though, Carter gets slammed with a fresh set of demands: His uncle pays an unexpected visit to London, expecting H.V. to play dutiful nephew and host. Sylvester takes an indefinite leave from his job, leaving Carter to do double duty. And then another professor at the college recruits Carter to perform dissections for him, the first assignment being a whopper of a walrus. He is just barely keeping his head above water when, literally from the top of the world, shattering news arrives concerning Joseph Bellot.

“It is my melancholy duty to inform you…[that] he has lost his life,” the story in
The Times
of London begins.

Although it reads like a personal letter of condolence, the Tuesday, October 11, story is actually a transcript of a dispatch filed from Her Majesty’s Ship
North Star
at Beechey Island in the Northwest Passage. The twenty-seven-year-old French lieutenant had returned to the Arctic as part of a new English expedition searching for Sir John Franklin,
¹
and things had gone terribly wrong, as the commanding officer reports. While making a perilous ice crossing with two shipmates, Lieutenant Bellot plunged into the dark waters of the Wellington Channel and drowned. His body was not recovered.

Though the dispatch had only just reached London, the tragedy had actually occurred eight weeks earlier. But as Carter and much of the city read the account, Bellot perished right there on the page.

Lieutenant Bellot was mourned in England and France and served in a small way to unite these historically antagonistic countries. Emperor Napoleon III took the unusual step of granting a pension to Bellot’s family, while in England funds were raised to erect an obelisk near the river Thames to commemorate the Frenchman’s role in the search for Franklin.
The Times,
following up on the story, ran a series of testimonials to the intrepid polar explorer. H. V. Carter submitted one himself, fondly recollecting his “accidental encounter” with Bellot in Paris. To gauge the full impact Bellot’s death had on Carter, however, one needs to go back to his diary—actually, diaries plural.

Carter reports the news of “poor Bellot’s decease” on the same date in both his daily diary and
Reflections,
using almost identical phrasing. This rare redundancy was no mistake, I believe, for Bellot’s death was a blow to both body and soul, and Carter felt compelled to address both aspects of himself. In his daily diary, Carter then adds what reads like a non sequitur: “Am 5 ft. 11½-tall, weigh 10¼ stone.” My first response to this was,
Thank you very much, H.V.
This was the first physical description he had provided, and as I had come across no photos or portraits of Carter as a young man, I was now able to begin picturing him. What a string bean! Though 4 inches taller than me, he was 10 pounds lighter (10¼ stone converts to 143 pounds, or 65 kilograms). And he towered over Henry Gray, who was five-two, tops. How odd those two must have looked if standing side by side—the one Henry tall and thin, the other stocky, dark, and gnomish.