The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [17]
“For a year, I was here all the time dissecting,” Dana said once we had reached the thirteenth floor, “even every Saturday night. That’s the way you learn anatomy. You sit down with a dissection manual and a cadaver, and you just slowly go through everything.”
I WOULD LOVE to have been an observer as Henry Gray learned the art of dissection. Colleagues who remembered him as a student invariably recalled a “most painstaking” and “methodical” worker but left no more telling details or anecdotes in the historical record. Fortunately, however, I am able to reconstruct the setting where the young Mr. Gray spent hundreds and probably thousands of hours quietly following his passion.
A fifteen-minute walk from his family home on Wilton Street would have brought an eighteen-year-old Gray to the north end of Kinnerton Street, to the building where St. George’s anatomy courses were taught. In what he and his classmates probably found a dubious comparison, the premises were often likened to the inner architecture of the human ear. The building was set well back from the street, and, just as the ear canal leads to the eardrum, one passed through a long, narrow alley before reaching the main door. Completing the analogy, the school’s circular anatomical theater represented the spiraling cochlea at the innermost part of the ear. Lecture halls, an anatomical museum, and an impressive dissection lab rounded out the floor plan.
That Kinnerton Street was a good four blocks from St. George’s Hospital was seen by the medical school administrators as a significant drawback but also a marked improvement over the previous accommodations. When the hospital established its school in 1829—sixteen years before Gray’s enrollment—the board of governors declared that anatomy would not be taught on the hospital’s grounds themselves but close by. Right across the street, in fact. An excellent independent anatomy school had just opened and could easily accommodate the St. George’s students. What could not have been foreseen, however, was how one of the directors of the anatomy school, James Arthur Wilson, would constantly come to loggerheads with hospital administrators. A bilious-sounding character who went by the nickname Maxilla (the anatomical term for the upper jawbone, inspired by his initials, J.A.W.), Dr. Wilson was described with admirable delicacy by one historian of the period as a man “somewhat over-conscious of his own excellencies.” After one too many quarrels with Maxilla, St. George’s chief surgeon, Benjamin Brodie, ended the association between the two schools and, in 1834, financed the purchase of the Kinnerton Street facility.
By the time Henry Gray began attending classes there in 1845, Dr. Brodie had retired as surgeon and anatomy instructor but, at age sixty-two, continued to practice medicine and was regarded as one of England’s leading medical authorities. As writer James Blomfield observes in his history of St. George’s Hospital, Brodie had attained a degree of public acclaim rarely seen nowadays: “It is difficult for those who live in the present day, with specialists for every kind of complaint, to imagine the position of a man like Brodie. He was consulted by patients of all ages and upon almost every conceivable form of accident or disease.” One famous case involved a gentleman who, in a conjuring trick gone awry, had accidentally inhaled a half-sovereign coin, which then lodged in the man’s upper right lung. However, it seems that the true performance did not start until Dr. Brodie’s arrival. Immediately, he turned the patient, Mr. Brunel, upside down, a feat made relatively easy by the man’s owning a “revolving frame,” which I will assume was like a knife-thrower’s prop: a circular board to which, under normal circumstances, a lovely assistant would be strapped at the wrists and ankles then spun while knives are hurled. Upside-down-ness did not, however, help Mr. Brunel cough up the coin. Rather, the object plugged his larynx and he began to choke. With a confident slice of a blade,