The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [78]
Yes, they are. Within days, the grandfather dies and Carter returns home for the funeral. “Find M. certainly changed,” he reports. “She really does look in a sinking state—very pale and thin, with an anxious expression.” In the entry, Carter also notes that he has prescribed opium as well as “Quinine Chloric Ether,” an anesthetic, which suggests his mother was in considerable pain.
After this, M. all but disappears from the diary. Then comes this:
Sun., April 5, 1857
This evening, at about 9:00, the landlady brought up a Telegraphic Dispatch, which contained the words, “Your mother died this morning. Come on Tuesday if you can, not later than Wednesday.”
Arriving home, H.V. and Joe find their mother laid out in her bedroom covered with a death shroud she had made for herself several years earlier.
Eliza Caroline Carter was forty-six years old.
In her final days, she did not send for her doctor son. “Not that I should not be delighted to see him,” his mother had said, a friend of the family told H.V., “but he will sit and watch me so earnestly, and can do no good.”
Thirteen
I LOOK UP FROM THE BODY AND FIND THE LAB EMPTY SAVE FOR Anne, an assistant who has been prepping dissections for the next day’s class, but she’s on her way out. “Turn off the lights when you go,” she calls, and the door springs shut behind her. It is only six o’clock but feels much later. The black October sky has turned the bank of windows into a mirror. I see myself and the class cadavers. All but mine are zipped up for the night in their white body bags.
I like being in the lab at this hour. There is a quality to the silence that reminds me of the libraries I loved as a child. My mind quiets as I focus on the task at hand, which tonight involves finishing up the day’s last assignment, a complicated dissection of the anterior thigh. I am doing this to help my lab partners, true, but also for my own edification. Since yesterday, we have been engaged in a three-day “Limb Lab,” an extensive exploration of the arms and legs, which includes studying a part of the body most people don’t even know exists: fascia.
Before I started studying anatomy, I certainly had no idea that we have under our skin a kind of second skin. And in truth, over the course of the courses, I have really viewed fascia only as the tissue one has to cut through to get to the “good stuff.” Henry Gray was never so dismissive. In fact, I now think of him as a passionate pro-fascia-ist. He considered fascia no less important than muscles in the overall composition of the body and gave the two equal billing in the third chapter of Gray’s Anatomy. Aware that this was an unconventional way to present the material, he felt the need to explain himself. The muscles and the fasciae are described conjointly, Gray writes in his introduction, because of the “close connexion that exists” between them. With that point made, he adds an observation of another sort. “It is rare for the student of anatomy in this country to have the opportunity of dissecting the fascia separately.” When one presented itself to me, therefore, I jumped at the chance.
And whom should I find but Professor Gray himself? There on Chapter One of the lab manual was his classic description of fascia, almost like an epigraph introducing the dissection I had to complete. The wording was all quite technical, really—“The fasciae are fibroareolar or aponeurotic laminae of variable thickness and strength found in all regions of the body,” and so on—but I could not help noticing that one tiny clause had been lost in transcription. In the original, Gray notes that fascia is