The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [3]
Critically praised author was added to the list in 1858. Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical, as Gray’s tome was originally titled, received excellent reviews, sold well, and was picked up by an American publisher the following year, by which point he was already working on a revised and enlarged second edition. In what came as a complete surprise to me, however, Gray did not create any of the book’s nearly four hundred signature anatomical drawings. These were the work of another Henry, one Henry Vandyke Carter, whose contribution was not even credited in the 1901 American edition of the book that I own. While this revelation raised a slew of new questions, others were put to rest when I learned how Henry Gray’s story ended: On Wednesday, June 12, 1861, he was scheduled to appear before the board of governors of St. George’s Hospital. As one of three finalists for a prestigious surgical position, he was expected to make a brief statement on his own behalf. But he never showed up. And word eventually reached the panel as to why. Henry Gray had died that very same day. When all the details emerged, it turned out that he had contracted smallpox while treating his young nephew who was suffering from the disease. Ten-year-old Charles Gray recovered and went on to live into his fifties, but Henry, who had been vaccinated against smallpox in childhood, died at his family’s longtime home, one week after falling ill. He was thirty-four years old.
At the time of his death, Gray reportedly had completed a substantial portion of a major new book, though this unfinished manuscript has never turned up. Even the original manuscript and drawings for Gray’s Anatomy have disappeared (most likely, I learned, they had gone up in flames when a fire decimated the British publisher’s archives the year Gray died). I probably would have left it at that—my curiosity about Henry Gray more than satisfied, my dream of contributing to medical history properly deferred—had I not come across one last thing: a photograph included in the one hundredth–anniversary edition of his Anatomy.
Taken fifteen months before his death, the photo shows Gray and two dozen young men grouped in what looks like a large art studio, with a high vaulted ceiling and drawings pinned to the walls. Sunlight pours down through the banks of skylights. Some standing, some seated, many of the young men have on long white smocks over their suits and ties—one even sports a beret—yet they wear uniformly solemn expressions, as if bearers of grim diagnoses. None is more serious, though, than Henry Gray. He is seated on a stool in the foreground, next to one of several low tables. A diminutive man with dark, deep-set eyes and thick, wavy hair, he looks like a pint-sized Heathcliff. Brooding and intense, he stares at the camera, waiting the long seconds for the shutter to close. This is, of course, a class photo, and no one holds the pose better than the cadaver lying just to Henry Gray’s right. Poking out from under a covering, its pale, narrow feet protrude over the table’s edge.
I could not get this picture out of my head: the spacious chamber bathed in daylight; the dead body on the table, its upper half sliced