The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [42]
This would be Gray’s submission for the Astley Cooper Prize, a prestigious award based on a dead man’s unusual posthumous request. As mandated in the will of Sir Astley Cooper (1768—1841), every third year a judging panel would accept manuscripts of original research on a predetermined anatomical part, pulled from a list he had drafted. The spleen was the current topic of inquiry. The not insignificant cash award to this triennial prize, paid from a sizable endowment, was £300. The winner would be announced the following July.
Cooper, a highly regarded English anatomist, surgeon, and professor, had died when Henry Gray and Henry Vandyke Carter were just boys. But he was responsible, in a sense, for bringing them together. Had it not been for Sir Astley’s prize, after all, Gray might not have found himself in need of an artist, back in June 1850; Carter might not have found himself offering his services; and, ultimately, the two Henrys might never have become friends.
There is no better gauge of a friendship, I believe, than the ability to do nothing together, and, as Carter’s diary testifies, the two had little trouble in that department. They would often while away quiet afternoons together, and one day Gray even coaxed Carter into doing something completely out of character: the two men stepped out of the hospital doors and just kept walking. Once they got to Chelsea, they took a leisurely boat ride on the Thames, eating up a whole half day. Carter, in other words, had played hooky! He normally fought against “idleness” and berated himself for each misspent minute, yet he never portrayed being idle with Gray as wasted time. Gray felt likewise, no doubt; in H. V. Carter, he had met a kindred spirit.
Despite the differences in age, religion, and family background, these two shared a keen interest in medicine and science, of course, but also a passion, verging on the macabre, for dissecting. For instance, even after Gray completed his one-year stint as postmortem examiner (1848—49), he continued on in an unofficial capacity. Quite often, Carter attended these autopsies as an observer, and at least once that I can verify, he assisted Gray in a PM exam. For both men, a postmortem was a dissection with a puzzle built in: What went wrong here? Sometimes, in addition, the examination yielded an unexpected anatomical treasure, such as a heart with four rather than three cusps to the aortic valve, an astonishing anomaly.
As for Carter, his dissecting proclivity was never more pronounced than during summer vacation back home. On top of fishing with his brother or walking and people-watching with his sister—seaside Scarborough swelled with vacationers (“trippers”) this time of year—he would spend many an hour performing dissections. Not on cadavers, mind you, but on local creatures, frogs and fish and such. In one nigh-maniacal marathon, he first dissected a single snail, then five more, then collected an additional half dozen for future disassembly. Oh, and p.s., “Snails not easily killed!” he noted boyishly in his diary. Though his relentless dissecting seems almost comical (and I can only imagine what his parents thought of this pastime), it also shows Carter’s seriousness of purpose, as he was, in effect, teaching himself comparative anatomy, the study of the similarities and differences in the structure of living things.
Following the 1850 summer break, he returned to London and performed what would become a ritual over the next few years: he immediately checked in with Henry Gray. I get the sense that seeing his friend after time away was a