The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [64]
I should mention one last major time-saving device Carter employed, one that, upon first learning of it, came as a surprise to me: he copied some of the illustrations from other anatomy books. This fact, omitted from the later American editions of Gray’s Anatomy, was acknowledged right up front in the original English edition at the beginning of a seven-page list of illustrations (also left out of later editions, if only to save space). The number of copied illustrations was small, 77 of the 363 total, and it is easy to understand Gray and Carter’s rationale: If another artist has perfectly captured a dissection, why not use what’s ready-made? You would save not just time but a cadaver, which, in the spirit of the endeavor, seems eminently practical. But what merited borrowing?
As it turns out, Carter pulled not from one or two but from nineteen different sources, including his beloved Quain’s. This discovery invokes the wonderful image of the two men raiding the St. George’s Lending Library and of Henry Gray’s home office being carpeted with dozens of anatomy books laid open to possible candidates.
I TAKE A seat as Ms. Wheat studies my list of the nineteen artist-anatomists. It literally goes from A to Z—Arnold, first name Friedrich, to Zinn, first name Johann—and comprises a who’s who of leading figures of the nineteenth century, not only English anatomists but German, Italian, French, Scottish, and Dutch as well. Most of these luminaries have since faded into obscurity, however, and copies of their works are now exceedingly rare. Which is the reason for my visit.
Ms. Wheat hands back the list and asks just one question: Where would I like to begin?
“With Arnold,” I reply without hesitation, and not simply because he is alphabetically first on the list. A third of Carter’s copied illustrations come from this single source. Friedrich Arnold (1803-90) was a longtime professor of anatomy at the University of Heidelberg, and he specialized in the microanatomy of the nervous system. He was the author of some sixteen books, most of which he also illustrated, one of which is now being delivered to me personally.
Ms. Wheat places a foam lectern in front of me, followed by Icones Nervorum Capitis (1834), Arnold’s first illustrated work, a monograph on the cranial nerves. It takes just a preliminary fanning of the pages to understand why Carter would wish to copy from it. Arnold’s artwork is seriously beautiful, as is the book as a whole. The pages are oversized and the lithography of the highest quality.
I linger over one of Arnold’s full-page drawings, a profile of a human head split down the middle—a hemihead. Though the line work is astonishingly precise in spots, the overall effect is sumptuous, almost painterly. Arnold’s style is unlike any I have ever seen, perhaps even deserving its own category. Call it Anatomical Romanticism.
With just a turn of the page, though, I begin to see a flaw in his approach to illustrating, one that Gray and Carter no doubt noticed as well. Friedrich Arnold produced illustrations in pairs, the first being a fine-art rendering; the second, a simple bold outline, as if for an anatomy coloring book. Only on this second page are the names of parts listed, so you have to flip back and forth between the two prints to get the full effect. While this would be only a minor nuisance for a student—as when footnotes, for example, are at the back