The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [10]
The first drawing one sees is of a cervical vertebra, one of the seven bones that, stacked atop one another, form the skeleton of the neck. Typical of Carter’s style, the bone is rendered with a fine, delicate line and with perfect shading to show depth and dimension. Though elegantly drawn, I somehow doubt it is the kind of thing his mother had in mind when, years earlier, she dreamed that her firstborn son would become a famous artist. Eliza Carter reportedly had so hoped that Henry would follow in the footsteps of the great seventeenth-century Flemish painter Sir Anthony Van Dyck, known for his lush portraits of English royalty, that she chose Van Dyck as his middle name. On the day of young Henry’s baptism, however, the desired spelling was misentered into the parish registry as “Vandyke,” an error that endured. Regardless, he would come to use his full given name only rarely, preferring to go by the initials “H.V.”
Carter may have inherited his mother’s hopes, but his artistic talent came from his father, Henry Barlow Carter, a popular Yorkshire watercolorist known for his landscapes. In addition to H.V., born on May 22, 1831, the Carters had a daughter, Eliza Sophia, called Lily, and a second son, Joseph Newington. (Lily and Joe, born in 1832 and 1834, respectively, shared the same birthday, December 26.) The family lived in Scarborough, a seaside village in northeastern England, where Mr. Carter was an art instructor and artist in residence at the local library. What provoked the young H.V.’s left-hand turn toward medicine is not certain, but two strong influences have been identified. His uncle, John Dawson Sollitt, was the headmaster at his grammar school and possessed a keen interest in science, as did one of H.V.’s older cousins, yet another Henry—Henry Clark Barlow—who was a physician as well as, curiously, a Dante scholar. Following his completion of grammar school (the British equivalent to high school), Carter, fifteen, became an apprentice to a pair of Scarborough physicians and during these nine months learned the rudiments of country medicine. A young man, however, did not become a licensed practitioner in a sleepy place such as Scarborough. At sixteen and a half, H. V. Carter “came to town,” as he would later put it, moving by himself to London, the largest city in the world at that time and home to a number of medical schools.
Unlike a student entering medical school today who steps onto the educational equivalent of a moving sidewalk—a set course of study, logical and well organized, leading straight toward a medical degree—Carter had to follow an often circuitous path in pursuit of training. Still, at least a path had been paved. Just a generation before, there were no established guidelines for a young man seeking a medical profession, even in the influential city of London. Writing of that period, British medical historian Charles Newman notes, “The process was entirely unorganized—it was left to the student to decide on his own curriculum and to find out how it could be followed.” While improvements had been made by the time of Carter’s arrival, the system remained disorganized, albeit in different ways. Now, seventeen independent licensing bodies existed—the Royal College of Surgeons, the Society of Apothecaries, the Royal College of Physicians, and so on—each with its own accreditation criteria.
Carter’s father had arranged for his son to be placed with the Royal College of Surgeons, under whose purview