The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [12]
Exactly what unpleasantness occurred Carter does not reveal, but, hazarding a guess, perhaps some school bully found his diary and threatened to divulge his secrets. This gave me pause. Was I violating H. V. Carter’s privacy, under the guise of research? At the same time, I felt that he could not have a more sympathetic reader. I, too, had started a journal at age fourteen only to rip it up a few months later. By destroying the pages, I could almost believe that the sinful thoughts I had recorded would cease to exist. I could then start fresh, my soul a blank white page. But like the young H.V., I continued to write. Over the years, I filled notebook after notebook and kept them as well hidden as I had learned to hide my inner self. In fact, I kept journals until my need to keep secrets finally ended when I came out in my early twenties. And yet, two decades later, I still have the journals, every last one.
Moving to the second page of Carter’s diary, I found him, precisely as he had noted, in London in December 1848, a seventeen-year-old halfway through his first year of medical school. From here, page after page of daily entries form weeks, then months, then years. Whirring through the microfilm, I stopped every now and then, like a crow drawn to a shiny object, and picked up pieces of his story. I found bright bits, but dark ones, too, admissions of success but also of failure and sin. His handwriting was sometimes loose and legible, but most often it resembled long strings of tiny knots. Here and there, familiar names and places popped out. Most exciting to see was how, beginning in 1850, the black-on-white pages became sprinkled with Grays, the name always written in beautiful cursive. I had found what I had been hoping for—Henry Gray lived on these pages—but there was more. The sprawling paper trail left behind by H. V. Carter would lead me not just through the winding corridors of St. George’s and into the dissection lab on nearby Kinnerton Street but, most intimately, most tellingly, deep into the troubled heart of a gifted man of science.
“YOU’RE BACK?” MASSOUD says when I join him at the dissection table on day two of class. His dark, bushy eyebrows have raised to the point of looking painful. “I cannot believe you’d come here voluntarily.”
I laugh and admit he has a point—most people would not choose to spend an afternoon disassembling a body, a gruesome business made more so by the harsh embalming chemicals. But to me, this is a small price to pay for seeing the extraordinary, the inner architecture of the human form.
Massoud and his classmates, obviously, do not have a choice about whether to be here. Each must pass this anatomy course in order to graduate, as must those enrolled in UCSF’s dental, physical therapy, and medical schools. As to why it is mandatory for pharmacy students, that is easy to understand. To grasp the basics of how medications work within the body—from, for example, the placing of a pill on the tongue to its passage down the throat and course through the digestive, then circulatory systems—one must first grasp the fundamentals of how the human body is constructed. Hence, ten weeks of Gross Anatomy, gross coming from the German for “large” and referring to structures of the body that are visible with the naked eye.
Dr. Rohde approaches our table and, before even saying a word, instantly captures our attention: she is holding a human heart. “The most amazing thing we do as human beings occurs the moment we’re born,” she goes on to say. “We have to learn how to breathe on our own.” And for the rest of our lives, the heart bears a scar of this life lesson. One of the goals for this afternoon’s lab is to find this mark in our cadaver.
Massoud