The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [80]
That the body is structured in such a consistent, organized way is another reason I find dissecting supremely satisfying, a view that Henry Gray surely shared. In fact, perhaps I misstated it earlier. Dissecting really has nothing to do with making things orderly. The order is already all there, just under the surface. The anatomist only has to uncover it.
HENRY GRAY IS in a box somewhere, I keep telling myself. Somewhere he survives in a box of letters, personal papers, manuscript drafts, page proofs (something), stashed away in a basement, a mislabeled carton, a forgotten storeroom, a locked drawer (someplace), just waiting to be discovered. But the box eludes me still. My many inquiries to libraries, universities, and medical societies have resulted only in the most politely worded series of Nos. Recently, however, two separate archivists I’d contacted added an intriguing footnote. Both mentioned another person who had made similar queries about Gray’s papers. Maybe he found something? Unfortunately, the inquiries had been made more than a decade earlier. Fortunately archivists specialize in saving such items as old correspondence; soon, I have a name and a London address. I dash off a letter.
Just four days later, an e-mail arrives from Mr. Keith E. Nicol. Though I’d purposely kept my letter brief, simply introducing myself and expressing my sincere interest in Henry Gray, apparently this is all Mr. Nicol needed to know. “I look forward to assisting you with your research, as I have quite a lot of information on Gray and his life and career in medicine,” he writes, suggesting that I begin by compiling a list of questions. “I will do my best to answer them.” It’s as though he had been waiting to hear from me all this time, and now he is eager to get started.
I promise to get back to him with a list of questions, but first, just one: Where had his interest in Gray originated?
He was working at a London teaching hospital in 1990, he replies, and had begun assisting a fellow staff member who was contemplating writing a biography of Henry Gray. The project didn’t last long for either man. By year’s end, Keith had been “made redundant” from his job, and soon after, the writer decided there was just not enough material for a book. Regardless, Keith had become hooked. Trying to piece together the anatomist’s life was a puzzle he could not set aside. And though he had no writerly aspirations himself, he took over the Gray research completely. Slowly, painstakingly, he accumulated a tidy collection of facts and details, most of which he discovered through old-fashioned detective work, hunting through municipal records offices and local libraries and archives, including those of St. George’s Hospital.
While nourishing his larger fascination with English history, the research also offered Keith a diversion during some very difficult times. In the midnineties, his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and, after an eight-year illness, died in the spring of 2003. The year before