The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [20]
Contrasting with entries on the latest death tolls are warm passages on his life in the home of John Sawyer. Sawyer, forty-five, the same age as Carter’s father, ran a private practice and apothecary out of his Park Street residence, and he and his wife had five daughters, ranging from nineteen years old down to six. Although Carter paid an annual fee for room and board, it is clear that he was embraced as a part of the family and that this home away from home provided much solace. On Sundays, he often joined the Sawyer family on walks through the nearby parks and spent the afternoons playing the role of indulgent big brother to the younger Sawyer children. And on Sunday evenings, he oftentimes accompanied the second eldest daughter, Mary, to chapel. Carter always comes across in his diary as a polite and proper young gentleman, never mentioning anything untoward, yet his hormones were definitely speaking to him. “Avoid temptations,” he includes in a list of gentle reprimands, and, “Be careful to improve your thoughts when alone.” If idle hands are the devil’s tools, as the saying goes, then the devil was two mitts shy once winter session 1849 got under way.
Seemingly overnight, Carter’s diary turns into a chronicle of anatomizing. Not only does he dissect in class most days of the week but sometimes at home as well, using souvenirs, for lack of a better word, he had gotten at postmortems. “Got two eyes,” he reports one night, obviously pleased, as if one eye would have been a big disappointment. “Got kidney and heart,” another day. And, once, “Had offer of brain, but declined,” a rare demurral. He also obtains parts from the hospital’s morgue, the aptly named Dead House. Somehow, though, his hunger to dissect never sounds ghoulish. To read Carter’s entries is to watch a young man chasing after knowledge at full tilt. He misses lectures because he loses track of time in the lab. He works through lunchtime, missing out on eating. From lecture to lab, lecture to lab, he sometimes returns to Kinnerton Street three times in a day. Ever fastidious, Carter will often record how long he spends dissecting, as if he were a runner training for a race, pushing himself to beat his own record. Though he takes off Christmas Day, he is in the lab New Year’s morning.
Carter’s growing mastery of dissection does not go unnoticed. Ten weeks into the session, instructor Prescott Hewett asks him to make a “preparation” for the anatomical museum. In other words, he would dissect some body part, which would then be bottled and preserved in “spirits” (alcohol) for students to study for years to come. In general, a preparation would have been done by a faculty member, but Carter was obviously gifted. And excited! For three days, he nervously awaits word of his assignment. He is given a hand, it turns out. “With name to be added,” he writes, meaning his name will be affixed to the bottle for posterity.
With the preparation turning out well, Dr. Hewett presents his protégé with a copy of Quain’s Anatomy, a much-appreciated gift. Carter inscribes his name in the book and, on his way home, purchases a protective cover for it. His pleasure overflows to the next day, when he pages through the illustrations and paints all the arteries red. This “Q” is “fine work!” he writes.
By this time, January 1850, Henry Gray had been promoted from demonstrator of anatomy to the hospital’s postmortem examiner. The twenty-three-year-old had also just enjoyed the honor of having a paper read before the Royal Society. That he was so rapidly making a name for himself made a deep impact on Carter, as shortly becomes clear in the younger man’s diary: “Must work!” he admonishes himself. “Gray getting on!” It is