The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [63]
As the darkness slipped into his diary more and more often, I could no longer write it off to Sunday. With the start of 1856, Carter’s moodiness becomes the blackest melancholy, and the twenty-five-year-old writes of being fitful, fatigued, and overtaken by lethargy, classic physical symptoms of depression. Carter knows he is not well but is at a loss for what to do. “Am right down [sic] helpless when ought to help self. No abiding effort. Must be compelled, not invited.”
Remarkably, he pushes through this latest episode, but it takes him a full four weeks. Finally he reports, “Made first drawings for the work.”
Now just 360 more to go.
Gray’s workload was no less daunting. He would have to write nothing short of an encyclopedia on anatomy in less than a year and a half. Under the circumstances, I would almost expect more quarrels and creative differences to have surfaced between the two men. But such did not seem to be the case. From the outset, author and artist shared a strong vision of the book they wanted to create. As historian Ruth Richardson observes in her introduction to the thirty-ninth British edition of Gray’s Anatomy, “Neither was interested in producing a pretty book, or an expensive one. Their purpose was to supply an affordable, accurate teaching aid for students like their own.”
As both men dealt with students on a daily basis and had recently been students themselves, they knew that small innovations would make a big impact. Unlike Quain’s Elements of Anatomy, which came in a three-volume set, for instance, this book would contain in a single volume everything a student needed to know about the human body. Further, bucking the trend of pocket-sized texts, some as small as 4 by 6 inches (10 by 17 centimeters), Gray, Carter, and their publisher, John Parker & Son, also planned a larger than usual book, with a no-squinting-necessary text size and illustrations that could breathe. Even at this size, 6 by 9½ inches (15 by 24 centimeters), it would still be light and easily totable. Parker & Son would also be happy, as this was a cost-effective size to print. The bottom line was, the book was shrewdly designed from the get-go to sell.
I cannot help bringing up a small irony here. The very phrase that H. V. Carter had used as an epithet to describe Gray also serves as a perfect characterization for the book the two had in mind: it would be altogether practical. What’s more, practicality would be a guiding principle throughout the project’s eighteen-month duration. Between author and artist, there would be no wasted effort. Performing dissections together, for instance, would save time on many fronts, including helping them come to a speedy agreement on the fine points of each illustration—what stage of a dissection should be drawn, what perspective to use, and so on. As seasoned anatomists, too, they certainly knew how to make the most of their most precious resource, cadavers. Between dissections done for classes and those for the book, no material would go to waste. I expect the same could be said when it came to the manuscript. Gray undoubtedly drew upon his three-year back catalog of lecture notes as a basis for his text and, alternatively, used any freshly written text as a basis for new lectures. This, I believe, helps explain the distinctive tone of Gray’s prose. You can open the book to almost any paragraph and find the clear, unrushed voice of an experienced instructor speaking directly to a rapt classroom.
Carter was able to do double duty as well, using dissections he had performed as demonstrator or for the Anatomy Museum as subjects to be drawn for the book. At first, he drew on paper, but about six months into the project, he made a radical change. He began drawing directly onto the wood blocks that would ultimately be used for the book’s engravings. Whether at the publisher’s behest or, as I suspect, on his own initiative, this