The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [18]
Though he had left behind his role as instructor, Brodie maintained a keen interest in the medical school he had helped found, and, through one channel or another, word of the talented Henry Gray came to his attention. The most likely messenger was Brodie’s nephew-in-law, Thomas Tatum, one of St. George’s top surgeons and an anatomy instructor for almost twenty-five years. That Brodie and Gray met is a certainty, but when? Interestingly, an answer is suggested in a dinner invitation that survives to this day—Sir Benjamin and Lady Brodie inviting Henry Gray to their home on Monday, the twenty-eighth of April—though the year is uncertain. A little detective work tells me that this day/date combination occurred only three times during Gray’s adult life—in 1845, 1851, and 1856. Of the three, the first date offers the most intriguing possibilities. Monday, April 28, 1845, is eight days before Gray registered at St. George’s medical school. I find supremely satisfying the idea that this is when he first met Benjamin Brodie, the legendary man to whom, thirteen years later, he would dedicate his great work, his Anatomy. I picture an intimate gathering, with Dr. Brodie personally introducing Henry to a few distinguished colleagues, the young man’s eyes as round as the Wedgwood plates as he shook hand after hand. But why would Sir Benjamin and Lady Brodie have invited this young nobody to their Savile Row residence? Well, it turns out, Gray had won a prestigious “junior prize” in anatomy as a sixteen-year-old, and the lad’s burgeoning talent had clearly impressed Dr. Tatum. Indeed, it was Tatum who, the following week, would cosign Henry Gray’s registration as a medical student.
But there’s a final reason I hope this early date was in fact their first meeting, for the warm invitation would serve as a prologue of sorts to Gray’s career just as another note from Brodie would serve, sixteen years later, as a fitting epilogue. Upon receiving news of Henry’s sudden passing, Dr. Brodie, at age seventy-eight and in failing health, wrote to a colleague: “I am most grieved about poor Gray. His death, just as he was on the point of obtaining the reward of his talents,…is a great loss to the Hospital and the School.
“Who is there to take his place?”
HENRY VANDYKE CARTER prepared for the first day of his first year of dissection in the same way a student today would: he shopped. After taking a quick look around the new laboratory at Kinnerton Street, the eighteen-year-old went and placed an order for a dissecting “gown,” a kind of loose cassock (a precursor to the green cotton scrubs of today), and then headed to Savigny & Co. and bought a “case of scalpels,” he reports in his diary on Saturday, September 29, 1849. Carter could not afford a copy of the standard anatomy guide, Quain’s Elements of Anatomy—“Funds low,” he notes in his usual clipped style—so he would just have to make do without.
The winter session would begin with speeches and an awards ceremony on Monday, and lectures and lab work on Tuesday. Carter, who had spent the past year and a half sitting through classes in anatomy, botany, physiology, chemistry, materia medica, and medical jurisprudence, would finally get his hands bloodied. “All prepared,” he writes before bedtime Monday night.
But it takes two to take the next step. “Not dissect for subject not ready,” he writes the following day (“subject” meaning cadaver), which may have been for the best since Carter’s gown was not ready yet either. Finally, on Wednesday, October 3, he makes his debut as an anatomist. Under the watchful