The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [29]
I make quick work of the gauze, then carefully lower the head into its bath of embalming fluid. The lid makes a thoomp sound as I press it closed.
Five
BETWEEN THE BOTH OF THEM, THE TWO HENRYS WON JUST about every academic honor offered at St. George’s during their years in medical school. For the year 1850, for instance, Carter received the annual Botany Prize—meaning he was his class’s top-ranked student in the subject—as well as smaller prizes in three other subjects, including, no surprise, anatomy. The awards were distributed during the opening ceremony for the school’s winter session.
In Carter’s diary entry for that October day, he sounds less than thrilled about having had to attend the “affair.” This was his third year in a row as a prizewinner, plus, even though classes had not yet begun, he was already deeply immersed in work. He had just started a new collaboration with Gray, an investigation into the development of chicken embryos, which involved much cracking of eggs, and he was also busy with his own studies. In fact, attending the ceremony meant setting aside a fascinating dissection at Kinnerton Street, changing into dressier clothes, and trudging over to St. George’s. Nevertheless, Carter reports being quite impressed with the closing speech given by Benjamin Brodie, who presided over the event. The revered doctor “excited ambition and,” Carter adds cryptically, “gave warnings.”
Curious about what Brodie might have said that so roused the nineteen-year-old, I make another visit to the Special Collections Room at UCSF. The library houses a first edition of The Works of Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, a rare three-volume set from 1865, and I am hoping it will contain some mention of Brodie’s long-ago speech.
I arrive to find that Ms. Wheat has already retrieved the books I’d requested and placed them, along with a clean pair of white gloves, on the broad reading table. As on past visits, I have the room to myself. I am prepared to spend hours searching through the thick volumes, all eighteen hundred pages, but no sooner have I taken the first from the stack and turned to the table of contents that I find exactly what I am looking for, even listed so that I cannot possibly miss it: “Address on Delivering the Prizes to Pupils of St. George’s Hospital.”
“Wow,” I exclaim in my loudest quiet voice. Ms. Wheat, tapping at her computer, shoots a smile in my direction.
Turning to page 532 almost makes me a believer in psychometry, the ability to pick up impressions from an object simply by touching it. I begin reading Brodie’s speech and can picture the whole scene: the crowded auditorium, the stage where Carter and his fellow prizewinners are seated, and Dr. Brodie at the podium, with his Ich-abod Crane face and wavy mane of gray hair. He addresses the student body collectively. “First, let me impress on your minds that the next few years are the most important and critical period of your lives. You are now to lay the foundation of that knowledge on which your future character—nay, your very subsistence—is to depend.
Let these years be wasted, and you will never be able to redeem the loss. Ceaseless but unavailing regrets will haunt you during the remainder of your days—”
Yeesh. There are those “warnings” Carter mentioned.
Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie
Soon, though, Dr. Brodie’s tone softens. “I leave it to your respective teachers to tell you what lectures to attend, what time to devote to the dissecting-room and hospital,” and so forth. But he had one sage thought to add: Get in Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie the habit of taking clear, careful