The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [55]
The hand is a minefield of nerves. Rachel adjusts the overhead lamp for better viewing. It is also crawling with veins and arteries and lumbricales, the long, winding muscles that help us stretch and extend the four fingers. (Lumbrical means “wormlike.”) Like all muscles, lumbricales would be useless were it not for tendons, the fibrous cords that unite muscle with bone and, like the strings of a marionette, make movement happen. Certainly the most astonishing tendons we have uncovered are the long, slender pairs running up each finger. They look like delicate reeds yet are obviously tough enough to last a lifetime—and beyond. They still work. By bending and unbending the cadaver’s index finger, Rachel and I see one tendon sliding over the other.
The topmost takes its name, as tendons tend to, from the muscle from which it emerges, the flexor digitorum superficialis, located way up in the forearm. This muscle also has an old-fashioned name, which I personally think is a better name, one that had persisted for five centuries and found its way into Gray’s Anatomy: the flexor digitorum sublimis. Why “sublime” rather than “superficial”? Well, purportedly, because the flexor digitorum sublimis sends its tendons to the fingers, including the single digit a romantic would consider the most important, the ring finger, and of course, marriage leads to sublime happiness, no?
As Rachel and I scrape off the last bits of fascia, she spills the remainder of her story: She’s married. She and her husband have a home in the Oakland hills, two dogs—a nice life. “But I wasn’t totally happy.” She hated her job and really wanted to work with people rather than numbers. Years ago, a wonderful physical therapist had helped her recover from a horrific auto accident, and having been on the receiving end ultimately led her along the path toward today. But oh, that physical therapist neglected to say how much work becoming one would be! Rachel’s midterm grades weren’t so hot, she confides, and she is already stressing about the upcoming finals. “I have got to know these bones,” she says, sounding like an accountant determined to make the numbers crunch.
“Well, let’s make it happen.”
I go to retrieve one of the five hanging skeletons positioned around the lab, to use for comparison. I love these things, I think as I wheel it to our table, how they are wired together like some crazy Calder mobile; how the bones rattle as you roll them; and, not least, how these are the real McCoy, not those bright white plastic clones made nowadays. Each skeleton is unique, different in size, coloring, and subtle surface markings, the bones themselves bearing a permanent imprint of the person who once was.
“I SEEM TO be always dreaming of writing or publishing some great fact—or facts—always hovering about, watching the adventurous ones and thinking of essaying to fly,” yet at the same time, “very much disregarding the preparatory hops and short flights of those who now fly high,” H. V. Carter begins his entry for March 18, 1854.
He could have stopped right there, as far as I am concerned. His words, at once somber and playful, soulful and angst-ridden, describe Carter so perfectly at this stage in his life that each time I read them, I find myself literally nodding in agreement. Yes, this is the you I’ve come to know. The wall between diarist and reader gives way, and I can see him as clearly as he is seeing himself. He sits in the Royal College of Surgeons library, his words suggest to me, taking refuge from the fumes of the laboratory and stealing a few minutes to write and think. Seated by an open window between banks of books, breathing in the fresh air, he watches people strolling in the park below, birds flitting about, carriages carting away the