The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [58]
And who might you be? I can imagine being the first question to Carter from Sir Gordon Drummond, a regular of Dr. Sawyer’s and a man whose name alone spells dyspepsia.
But it wasn’t just his boyish looks that gave Carter away as green. “Try too much to make self agreeable, which people who are ill don’t so much relish as a more suppressed and sober manner,” he writes one evening, diagnosing his own performance. Carter, who often lacked a certain social polish even in casual settings, found himself flustered and forgetful at those very moments when he could least afford to be—while seeing patients. “Omit many questions, etc., absolutely necessary to a careful enquiry into nature of ‘case,’” he pointed out. But what made the young doctor most anxious was writing prescriptions. To his dismay, he didn’t “find knowledge so ready at one’s finger’s ends” (or fingertips, as one would say today) and sometimes remembered the very best drug or dosage only after the patient had gone.
His week did end on a successful note, Carter happily reported, when he earned a fee of £1 for setting a broken leg. The patient had been a referral and wasn’t a person but a bird—one Lady M.’s “favorite bullfinch!” Adept at taking animals apart, Carter was no doubt also gifted at fitting them back together. At least this is the impression one gets from his diary, which sometimes reads as if he were being trained as a veterinarian. At the college, an entire menagerie comes under his capable scalpel, from a walrus to a dog to a horse to a cuttlefish. Sometimes, too, he would also draw the creatures. In the summer of 1854, he had spent days dissecting and making drawings of a South American giant anteater, a magnificent creature he had actually gone to see when it was a popular (albeit short-lived) attraction at the zoo in Regent’s Park. Given the task of anatomizing the anteater, Carter put up with fumes so foul he suffered from diarrhea and headache and ultimately earned high regard from superiors for his “artistic skill and praiseworthy industry.” In spite of this, one might reasonably question the real-world relevance of the entire exercise, given that the only example of this peculiar animal in all of Great Britain was now dead.
Carter himself recognized the often esoteric nature of his work. “I don’t dislike the occupation,” he tells Lily. “In fact it suits me very well, though how it will further my practical experience, or enable me to cure more patients, I cannot tell.”
“Rough sketch” of an anteater, H. V. Carter, 1854
His restlessness with the studentship comes through most strongly with the start of the new year, 1855. At this point, with less than six months left at the college, he has little of significance to occupy him. Mr. Queckett is frequently ill and often not at work. Also, the junior student (to Carter’s senior) had recently resigned and taken a “better appointment,” a surgency with—as irony would have it—the General Screw Steamship Company, “a berth I once sought.” But if hearing the younger man’s news had hurt, Carter does not let on. He has both larger and smaller concerns. As he writes in early February, “The point is still, what to work at?” While he still entertains “dreams of [having a] delightful country practice,” he is leaning more toward a career in medical research. His recent purchase of a high-powered microscope has opened new possibilities. “Have now sufficient confidence to trust [my] own powers in any branch of investigation concerning human anatomy”—note the distinction—“and now seem to wait for [the] opportunity.”
The day after he turns twenty-four, opportunity knocks: “Professor Hewett made an offer that [I] should attend to [St. George’s] Anatomy Museum and be a Demonstrator for £50 per annum—a kind and pleasing thing.” If he were to take the job, Carter would primarily assist Henry Gray, in both the museum