The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [21]
That same day, Dr. Hewett had offered him a new project: to preserve some anatomical specimens not by dissecting but by drawing them instead. The subjects would be hospital patients with unusual maladies. Keen to help out, Carter agrees, and, two weeks later, he finds himself in the women’s-only “nurse’s room,” performing the delicate task of painting a woman’s diseased breast. Carter “manage[s] tolerably” and finishes in an hour, after which the breast is surgically removed. His next subject is a thigh of unspecified pathology.
Nowhere in his diary do I get the impression that Carter ever imagined he would be bridging medicine and art. True, his father was a working artist and he had grown up drawing and painting, but he had come to London to learn new skills, not brush up on old ones. Asking him to draw was like asking someone who is bilingual to translate—no big deal. However, Hewett, who as a young man had hoped to be a painter himself, even studying in Paris, was definitely impressed with Carter’s work. He called it “capital,” Carter reports proudly.
As true in real hospitals as in soap opera ones, there were not a lot of secrets in the corridors of St. George’s. Word reached Henry Gray of Carter’s abilities, and Gray, it so happened, was in need of an artist’s eye. Would you mind looking at some drawings I’ve had commissioned? he inquires one day. The discussion that followed must have had an interesting dynamic because, in this area of expertise, Carter was Gray’s superior.
The drawings were made for an essay Gray was writing on the spleen. One illustration was “miserable,” Carter recalls that evening. Another, “shabby.” What’s more, in Carter’s view, the fee the artist was asking was preposterous. Henry Gray himself, though, made an excellent impression: “Gray very clever and industrious: a good model.”
On first reading this entry, I was pleasantly surprised by the nineteen-year-old’s forthrightness in assessing the artwork. Good for you, H.V. Embedded within this same passage I found something even more illuminating, though it is written so quietly it would be easy to miss: “Offered own assistance.” Carter than adds matter-of-factly, “Gray will let do some.”
Will let me do some, he’s saying, I thought to myself, filling in the implied pronoun. At that moment, I felt as though the research gods were smiling down on me. Here was proof that they began working together almost two years earlier than historians have thought, I realized with a start. And it was not Henry Gray who first proposed the idea, as I would have assumed, but H. V. Carter. For him, Friday, June 14, 1850, started and ended like any other day—which is to say, like any other diary entry—but sometime between wake-up and bedtime, a historic partnership was formed.
Four
FIVE DAYS INTO THEIR FIRST COLLABORATION, HENRY VANDYKE Carter could happily report that Henry Gray liked the work he had done, and yet, he admits in his diary, drawing the spleen is “not easy.” In fact, the spleen is “not” a lot of things, I am finding, seven weeks into Gross Anatomy. It is not part of the digestive system, for instance, though it’s located in the abdominal cavity. It is not part of the urinary system either, though it’s connected to the left kidney. It is also not a part of the circulatory system, though its two main jobs are blood-related—recycling worn-out red blood cells and helping produce certain infection-fighting white blood cells. That these cells are called lymphocytes gives a clue to the spleen’s actual affiliation: the lymphatic system. The spleen is one last “not,” I should add. It is not vital. If it has to be removed due to injury or illness, the body can make do just fine without it.
The spleen is oblong and about half a foot long (fifteen centimeters) and, on the inside, spongy, with two kinds of pulp, red and white, which may have been the aspect Carter found difficult to render. Regardless of its actual appearance,