The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [72]
“I assumed I’d get a man,” Blake clarifies. “I don’t know why, I just thought I would—so I was really…surprised that I got a woman.”
He must have seen the huh? still stuck to my face. Blake confides that his grandmother is terminally ill, and he’d dreaded the idea of having to dissect an elderly female cadaver. Then he got one, and, wouldn’t you know it, he discovers that the cause of death was the same lung condition his grandmother is suffering from, COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “That was kind of upsetting.”
Blake looks down at his hands for a second. “But then, it was kind of weird,” he says. “I had to dissect the lung, of all things, that was my assignment, and I almost felt bad or guilty because I didn’t freak out. I just, you know, followed the instructions and basically chopped it off and scooped it out with my hands—” He winces at his inelegant phrasing. “I almost wish—”
“You’d had a harder time doing it,” I say.
“Yes.” He falls quiet.
“Well, hey, look at it this way,” I tell him. “It’s your first day of medical school, and you’ve already learned what must be one of the hardest lessons.”
He gives me a skeptical look. “Yeah? What’s that?”
“Keeping your emotions in check so you can do your job.”
Blake manages a half smile and nods.
Twelve
H. V. CARTER WAS ONLY TWENTY AND NOT YET A DOCTOR WHEN he began doctoring his own mother. This went way beyond making pills for her, as he had in the past. He now felt competent and confident enough to help direct her care. During his time home for Christmas break 1851, he gave his mother an extensive physical exam, after which he wrote up his findings and recapped her entire medical history in his diary (on Christmas Eve, of all nights). What had heretofore gone unsaid he now makes clear: his mother, forty-one years old, had breast cancer.
“M.” had discovered a lump fourteen years earlier, Carter writes, but, “suffering no inconvenience,” paid it no mind until seven years later, when the mass began to grow and the pain became chronic. Even so, it would be three more years before M. traveled to London to see a specialist—Henry Gray’s mentor, the famed Benjamin Brodie, as it turned out—and her illness was finally diagnosed.
Now, Carter reports, “Whole size of mass equal to palm of hand nearly,” the pain has spread to her hips, and she is taking a long list of medications, the dosages for which he carefully notes. While a local physician visited her regularly, Carter had been closely monitoring his mother’s treatment over the past two years and, in a sense, following her case since he was a boy. He was just thirteen when she first fell seriously ill, and sixteen when, in the summer of 1847, she was diagnosed. At that very time, it is fascinating to note, Carter had just started his apprenticeship in a Scarborough medical practice, and by year’s end, he would be in London to attend the same medical school where—yes—Dr. Brodie was serving as professor emeritus. Now here’s where coincidence stops being coincidence, I believe, as mother and son’s histories merge. Though some historians have surmised that Henry Vandyke Carter chose medicine over the family business, art, because of the influence of a science-minded uncle, I think otherwise. It surely had to do with his mother. Perhaps if he became a doctor, the teenager must have thought, he could save her.
Given the gravity of her condition at Christmastime 1851, it is surprising to find Eliza Carter continuing to appear in her son’s diary. The mentions, year after year, are typically brief and blunt—“M. worse,” or “M. weaker”—like addendums to her case notes. So much so, in fact, that I started wondering if H. V. Carter ever saw her as more than just Patient M. I know of only one way to find out. I make an online visit to the Wellcome Library’s Carter catalog and do some shopping.
Just twelve letters from H.V. to his mother have survived, surely a small fraction of the number he wrote over the years, but from these, a clear and striking impression emerges. Yes,