The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [62]
“You saved me from doing that dissection myself,” Kim says, clinking a Snapple bottle to my Heineken. “So, thank you, Bill!
“Come on,” she adds, “it’s time for a tradition.” Sam has set up a digital camera on the deck railing for a class photo in the backyard. He sets the automatic shutter, then hops down and squeezes in next to Kim and me.
Click.
In the moment, I cannot help but flash on the photograph that launched me on this journey six months ago—Henry Gray and his students in the St. George’s dissecting room. I look at that collection of faces several times a day, as I have made the photo the wallpaper on my computer. It never fails to seize my attention. I no longer zero in only on Henry Gray but notice other characters: the gentleman seated directly to Gray’s left, for instance, who, with his muttonchops and formal black coat, looks like the heir to a cough-drop fortune; and, just behind him, the younger fellow, arms crossed at the wrist, who appears to have lost his left hand. Then there are the two scamps at the very back who stand on either side of a human skeleton. Is the one on the left holding the skeleton’s hand? But what I mostly see in this picture now is a missing person—H. V. Carter.
By the time this photo was taken, March 1860, Carter was no longer the demonstrator of anatomy. He was no longer even affiliated with St. George’s Hospital or, for that matter, a resident of London. In fact, he would not come to call England his home again for thirty years.
What had happened in the interim? Where had Carter disappeared to and why? Well, the full, tortuous story comes complete with a torrid scandal straight out of a Victorian novel. But first things first. The two Henrys still have a masterpiece to create. And just two weeks into their collaboration, Henry Vandyke Carter has hit a major obstacle.
Eleven
“[HAD A] LONG CHAT WITH GRAY, WHO CANNOT UNDERSTAND that anyone should really wish to work and yet not be able to begin,” Carter confides to his diary on January 8, 1856. “He is altogether practical—‘Do it!’—his aim ‘money,’ chiefly. As for self, need energy and right counsel. Mind certainly not healthy or balanced, and time very indifferently spent.”
This sounds less like a chat and more like a spat. Every time I read this entry, I feel as if I am right there as these two enact a fascinating early scene in the genesis of Gray’s Anatomy. Each Henry plays his role to a T: Gray, the taskmaster, is all business, while Carter is the temperamental artiste who seems to have misplaced his muse. Oh, he sounds so grieved, so misunderstood! But he also sounds troubled. The line Mind certainly not healthy or balanced always stops me cold. Though I can make no claims to a definitive diagnosis, this young man seems gripped not just by artist’s block but by a debilitating depression as well.
That H. V. Carter was prone to dark moods had been clear from the start of his diary. To some extent, I had taken this tendency with a grain of salt, as I know that sometimes, on the pages of one’s diary, feelings get overblown, the better to puncture and purge them. Also, I had noticed a predictable pattern to Carter’s moodiness. He suffered from a condition I had myself as a young man, what I call the Sunday syndrome. His entries tended to be at their longest, most heartfelt, and most angst-ridden on Sundays, the day when he set aside worldly matters and took time to reflect and attend church. The sermons delivered by the ever-stalwart Reverend Martin were rarely less than “capital” or “excellent” and always left Carter with a boost of fresh resolve to be a good, moral, industrious person. But this was the spiritual equivalent of a sugar high. By the end of the day—diary-writing time—he would crash and burn, convinced that he fell far