The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [11]
Freshly articled and newly settled, H. V. Carter was then able to take his next big step in becoming a doctor: on May 27, 1848, he registered as a student at St. George’s Hospital Medical School and immediately plunged into full-time coursework. Coincidentally, as Carter was starting his education at St. George’s, Henry Gray, four years older, was in the last year of his. Though their momentous collaboration was still a decade off, it’s safe to say that the two men first met, at least in an academic context, in the last weeks of 1848. As was true of Mondino’s time, dissections were performed only during the coldest months, so Carter’s study of the human body did not begin until the start of the winter session. And, as fate would have it, Henry Gray had just been newly appointed as demonstrator of anatomy.
So did the two become fast friends? When did Gray learn of Carter’s artistic talent? Was the Anatomy their first work together?
Well, of course, Gray doesn’t say. While the historical record for the famed anatomist is silent, such is not the case for his lesser known colleague. In fact, in the time leading up to my first day of anatomy class, I had discovered that a trove of H. V. Carter’s diaries, letters, and other personal documents was stored at the Wellcome Library in London. The papers, which date from his grammar school days to the end of his long life, had scarcely been studied. With tact and a credit card, I was able to persuade the library’s archivist to have the first two diaries microfilmed for me, sight unseen, so that perhaps I, too, could witness life in London in the middle of the Victorian era and, through H. V. Carter’s eyes, hopefully get a glimpse of the inscrutable Henry Gray.
Only after I had placed my order did a sinking feeling hit: What if I could not read Carter’s handwriting? That doctors have notoriously bad penmanship can hardly be unique to our day and age. What if the diaries were impenetrable, and that is why Carter’s story remains largely untold? Just as worrisome: what if he had used his diary not as a repository for his feelings and experiences but as a mere date book, filled with nothing but class notes and study schedules?
Six long weeks later, my answer arrived by mail on a fat spool in a sturdy square box. I headed immediately to that last refuge of the antiquated technology of microfilm, the public library. Providing tech support and, if needed, moral support, along with me came my longtime partner, Steve.
Steve fed the thick, wide film leader into one of the brutish old projectors, and I, with fingers crossed, pressed the Forward button. First came the loud flapping sound as the microfilm struggled to catch onto the receiving spool, then the quieter hum as it sped through the projector. A long stretch of velvety blackness filled the screen and then a blinking brightness. I backed up to Part ONE.
The diary of H. V. Carter got off to a very promising start. In the opening lines, written in a large, childlike script, I got immediate answers to my first questions: why and when did he start keeping a diary?
A gift from his “Grandmamma,” it reads, the diary was “to be commenced May 22nd, 1845,” the boy’s fourteenth birthday, “when leaving Scarborough for school in Hull.” (Hull was a city down the coast where he would be a boarder at the grammar school headed by his uncle.) What immediately follows this text, though, is not the musing of a fourteen-year-old but instead a terse disclaimer written by Carter seven years later:
“I began my Journal at the above date or soon after and continued it for at least six months being then at School in Hull,” he explains, “but from an unpleasant occurrence happening at this time, the journal was