The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [8]
I fold back into the group as they reassemble the chest cavity and notice something startling: the gauze wrapping has fallen away from the cadaver’s right hand. The fingernails, a part of the body extremely slow to decay, are still those of a well-groomed little old lady—nicely rounded and buffed, as if she had just come from a manicure. I lift her wrist and the whole arm rises stiffly. I rewrap her hand in gauze, then help pull the drape over her body.
AFTER CLASS, I cross Parnassus Avenue and move from the realm of rubber gloves to white cotton ones, from the dissection laboratory to the Special Collections Room of UCSF’s medical library. I have an appointment with a first edition. Up two flights of stairs, the jewel box of a room is climate-controlled and silent, and, save for the librarian and me, empty. Ms. Wheat retreats to a back room in her familiar way and reappears moments later. I love this almost ceremonial part of my visits, the way she approaches my table with the requested volume in her gloved hands, as if she were a sommelier cradling a rare vintage. With a whispered thank you, I nod in approval as she places before me an 1858 copy of Gray’s Anatomy.
The book rests on a large foam pad, angled like a lectern but deeper near the center to minimize stress on the spine. For a nearly 150-year-old book, it is in amazingly good shape. As I admire the pristine brown leather cover, I pull on the thin white gloves Ms. Wheat has left me and can’t help noticing how similar they are to the ones my sisters each wore to their First Holy Communion. I crack open the cover and turn the first few pages. This releases the faint earthy smell unique to very old books, a smell I happen to like, a scent preserved from another time.
Although his book has assumed the mantle of a classic, Henry Gray wrote it for a most prosaic purpose: to satisfy a pressing need for new medical textbooks. The demand was driven by several factors, but the most compelling was the discovery of anesthesia in its earliest form, chloroform. Nowadays, when “going under the knife” is a phrase that’s slipped into casual conversation and surgery is entertainment on reality shows, it is hard to imagine how revolutionary it was to suddenly have the ability to safely put patients under, to be able to cut into their flesh without their feeling that burn of the blade. Prior to this innovation, the field of surgery was chiefly concerned with—as paradoxical as this sounds—external medicine, what the doctor could see or easily feel under the skin, whether this was a boil to lance, rotten tooth to pull, or gangrenous limb to remove. Since the patient was conscious, a surgeon had to be dexterous and, above all, speedy. With the use of anesthesia, operating theaters became far quieter, doctors could take more time, and an all-new terrain opened up. As never before, doctors had access to deeper, heretofore unreachable areas of the body. Consequently, the scope of what a medical student had to learn grew exponentially; hence, the need for an exhaustive encyclopedia such as Gray’s Anatomy.
Of course, anatomy texts had been around for more than five hundred years by this point; Henry Gray was not inventing the wheel here. And in fact, several decent textbooks were already available. Quain’s Elements of Anatomy, for instance, was in its sixth successful edition at the time. But Gray had clear ideas on how to make a better book, and a commercially successful one. The main selling point would be its emphasis on surgical anatomy—applying anatomical knowledge to the practice of surgery. This alone would make Gray’s Anatomy a great buy—a practical text that would remain useful long after the student entered the professional world.
His author credit forms two lines on the title page, bold and capped:
HENRY GRAY, F.R.S.,
LECTURER ON ANATOMY AT ST. GEORGE’S HOSPITAL
For me, seeing it in its original