The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [52]
Carter reports the news of “poor Bellot’s decease” on the same date in both his daily diary and Reflections, using almost identical phrasing. This rare redundancy was no mistake, I believe, for Bellot’s death was a blow to both body and soul, and Carter felt compelled to address both aspects of himself. In his daily diary, Carter then adds what reads like a non sequitur: “Am 5 ft. 11½-tall, weigh 10¼ stone.” My first response to this was, Thank you very much, H.V. This was the first physical description he had provided, and as I had come across no photos or portraits of Carter as a young man, I was now able to begin picturing him. What a string bean! Though 4 inches taller than me, he was 10 pounds lighter (10¼ stone converts to 143 pounds, or 65 kilograms). And he towered over Henry Gray, who was five-two, tops. How odd those two must have looked if standing side by side—the one Henry tall and thin, the other stocky, dark, and gnomish.
By listing his measurements, Carter obviously was not trying to do historians a favor. He was taking stock of his corporeal self, I have come to see. The stark reality of Bellot’s death struck deepest as Carter put pen to paper that evening, and he reacted much as one might after a bad traffic accident, say, when you step out of your vehicle and give yourself that kind of mental pat-down, making sure you’re still all there. In the upswell of emotion, I’m not even sure he was fully aware of what he was recording on the page. After his height and weight he also notes his lung capacity (a “sound” 240 centimeters per inhalation), which suggests that he may have even gone in for a physical exam that day. In any event, I find this last detail almost poetic in its inference, as the drawing in of breath is the drawing in of life.
That the specter of death spooked him so surprised me. As an anatomy student, Carter had handled dead bodies for years, routinely carrying the scent of death in his hair and hands and clothes. As a surgeon in training, he’d certainly seen many tragic deaths, and he lived at a time when death by infectious disease, inoperable illness, or irreparable injury was common. But I suppose he also possessed the blitheness of youth, that sense of invulnerability that’s not lost until you cross irreversibly into adulthood. With Bellot’s death, Carter must have felt—and recognized—that cold breath on the back of his own neck, and now he couldn’t shake the feeling. One night in his diary, for instance, he sounds panic-stricken when reporting that an acquaintance is “fearfully ill with typhus fever” and that another is already “dead of the same! Fearful—fearful warnings! Why am I left so intact?”
In this rattled state, he experiences a series of stumbles, some little, some big, but all hugely amplified in his mind. For instance, Carter misses an appointment with Gray one day, “from not being quite punctual, a failing of late with me.” But a far more substantial failure soon follows: in mid-November, he bombs the M.B. exam—bombs it big-time. “Truly a week to be remembered in the history of my Studies,” he writes, after the fact, “for have failed when about to grasp the last and highest scholastic distinction have aimed at.” Unlike other friends and colleagues, Henry Gray shows great kindness in not even bringing up the subject of this “late failure,” Carter reports.
How swiftly his circumstances had changed. I could still envision his face lit up in the grand illuminations of the City of Light. In less than the span of a season, though, Carter had become a different person, more mature but also touched with melancholy, as evidenced in one of his final entries of the year. The date is Tuesday, December 13, 1853, and he sits alone in the dissecting room at the Royal College of Surgeons:
“Through the kindness of Mr. Queckett, [this] room—otherwise so bare, unnecessarily so, of almost all necessary accommodations—is now furnished with a lamp to eke out these dark afternoons.” In what seems like a fitting metaphor for his own changed perspective, the lamplight