The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [56]
Over the past nine months, he writes, he has met here at the college many luminaries of the London medical world, many of whose works share space on the library’s shelves, but the experience has not always been all he had hoped for. A person may think he knows a man “by his book, or published lectures, etc.,” the twenty-two-year-old observes, but when you “see the man himself, hear him, speak to him, watch him,” your opinion is “commonly somewhat shaken.” In sum, “The whole resolves itself into this: The more one knows of a man, the more difficult it is to retain [a] favourable opinion, or implicit reliance on, him.”
This seems to be one of those days when Carter can write no wrong, when he displays an insightfulness well beyond his years. The closing line of this short entry is also a beauty. “Two persons are generally concerned in every fact,” Carter notes, “one discovers part, the other completes and corrects.” The sentence has the pleasing concision of a maxim, one that could as easily apply to the two Henrys as it could to me and Carter, narrator and subject. Sometimes, though, I am baffled by facts he brings to light. Three months following this last entry, for instance, he makes a painful discovery in Henry Gray’s just-published book on the spleen: he finds page after page of his artwork but no credit whatsoever for himself as the artist. Stunned, Carter takes to his diary. “See Gray’s Book on Spleen,” he jots. “Takes no notice of my assistance though [he] had voluntarily promised [to do so]. Rather feel it”—slighted, that is, and justifiably so. In a preface written expressly for the book, Gray had thanked by name the other colleagues from St. George’s who had assisted him in various ways, warmly referring to each as a friend, which surely must have made the omission sting all the more. Even so, Carter doesn’t seem to hold a grudge for more than a sentence; immediately he goes on to praise Gray’s book as “very creditable.” And that is where it’s left. He never confronts Gray about the matter, and Gray never brings it up.
Illustration from Henry Gray’s
On the Structure and Use of the Spleen
At a loss to understand what happened, I find that I want to blame the publisher; it is possible a paragraph was cut from the preface, perhaps to save space, certainly without Gray’s knowledge. To me, that is the only satisfying answer. Carter, I believe, had a very different explanation, one that reflected a significant change in his perception of the world. He thought he deserved it. The omission wasn’t a sign from Gray. No, it was a sign from God.
Coloring his thinking was Providence, a Christian concept that colored my own upbringing. But Catholics do not spell the word with a capital P, as strict Evangelicals such as Carter did, and in that single letter lies a world of difference in how one views God’s workings. I always understood providence in its broadest sense, as the belief that, while God has a master plan for all of creation, certain actions and events are beyond our comprehension. Though inexplicable, they are “providential,” or, as God intended.
By contrast, Carter saw God as a hands-on manager of human affairs who, if pleased or displeased with an individual, intervenes through acts of Providence, sent from heaven like a personal bolt of lightning. This was a bedrock belief of Victorian-era Evangelicalism, as Cambridge historian Boyd Hilton has observed. God operated through a “system of rewards and punishments appropriate to good and bad behaviour,” Hilton writes. “Almost always in the case of individuals, and sometimes in the case of communities [for example, an epidemic of cholera], suffering was the logical consequence of specifically bad behaviour. It could therefore incite as well as guide men to virtuous conduct in the future, but they must of course take the opportunity to examine their own actions in the light of their suffering.”
Providence was clearly not a notion Carter invoked lightly. The word itself did not make a major appearance