The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [19]
This last little admission is the kind of ironic detail that brings a smile to my lips, knowing as I do the role H. V. Carter will go on to play in creating the most famous anatomy guide of the past two centuries. Another such moment comes three pages later, with the first mention of Henry Gray. So synonymous has the name Gray become with anatomy—as familiar a pairing as Webster and dictionary—that it is jarring to see it spelled incorrectly, as Carter does on October 31, 1849. The error is unusual for him, an impeccable speller otherwise, and suggests that the two men did not know each other well yet. As for the mention—“See Grey, promise” is all he writes—it makes no sense to me. But that’s fine; it is part of the odd dynamic that develops between diarist and reader as the lopsided omniscience borne by both gets traded back and forth. Which is to say that at any given moment, on any given day, Carter experiences far more than he ever puts into words, just as I, on any given page, know far more than he about the course his life will take.
For Carter, keeping a diary had been intended originally as a character-building exercise, a good “habit” for a young man to keep (good habits being prophylaxis against bad ones). For me, deciphering his diary has been like performing a dissection in reverse—a slow piecing together. The process has required spending numerous hours in the microfilm reading room at the library, where Steve and I have gotten to know the tics and quirks of each microfilm projector and become familiar with the microfilm-reading regulars. Those of us who gather there are an odd little community of time travelers. Most everyone reads newspapers, an old-fashioned pastime made more so by the age of the newspapers themselves—antique issues of the London Times, say, or a monthlong run of the defunct Chicago Herald. Steve and I are not so different. The daily news we’re reading just happens to be in the form of a diary.
In what now reads like an epigraph, Carter started his diary with an aphorism that sounds as if it were taken from a Victorian-era self-improvement book: “Let the same thing, or the same duty, return at the same time everyday, it will soon become pleasant.” He would frame each entry, beginning with the time he woke, closing with his bedtime, and capturing the hours in between in a few deft lines. Just as a painted portrait acquires depth and texture with the accretion of paint, an image of H. V. Carter emerges only after many weeks of entries. A serious, disciplined young man, he reads the Bible and prays daily, and goes to church—often twice—on Sundays, but he is also only seventeen years old and had moved from a town of ten thousand to one of more than a million, so naturally a boyish excitement bursts through every so often. He is left almost speechless one day by a sighting of Queen Victoria, while a few weeks later, he is fascinated by troops practicing formations in Hyde Park. At the same time, his eyes are also being opened to unpleasant realities. On May 23, 1849, the day after his eighteenth birthday, Carter begins serving a “clinical clerkship” at the hospital, a position in which he would shadow staff surgeons and take their case notes. Just two days later, he witnesses a horrific procedure, the amputation of a boy’s leg. “Chloroform not used,” he writes that evening, which comes as a chilling reminder that anesthesia during surgery was not yet standard practice.
At times, Carter’s prose is so immediate and concise, it is as though he were dictating a telegram. “Cholera case,” he writes on July 6. “First I’ve seen. Came in yesterday 6:30 P.M. Died 6:30 P.M. today. Terrible disease.” The next day, he attends the postmortem