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By Root 1012 0

the narrow passageway that students in Gray and Carter’s day likened to an ear canal and head to the eardrum, or front door. At the moment, I feel less like a student and more like a proselytizer. Do the people who live here know who once walked their floorboards? A small part of me is tempted to press one of the dozen door buzzers and invite myself in for a chat. I would talk not only about Henry Gray and H. V. Carter but about Timothy Holmes, a charismatic St. George’s man who creeps into their story. Holmes, who shared demonstrator duties in the lab during Carter’s tenure, was, by all accounts, a larger-than-life character—a one-eyed surgeon, a lover of theater, a terror to anatomy students. Holmes helped his friend Henry Gray read and edit the hundreds of page proofs for the first edition of Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical. But more important, Holmes served as editor of the book for seven consecutive editions following Gray’s death. He, probably more than any single person over the next twenty years, helped keep Gray and Carter’s legacy alive.

Rather than disturbing the Kinnertonians, Steve and I exit the ear canal and keep walking. The neighborhood is filled with fine Georgian homes, and I find that, by lifting my line of sight just above car level, it is easy to imagine we are in another time—the mid-nineteenth century, to be precise. Jet lag no doubt enhances the effect.

Checking our nineteenth-century map and following Henry Gray’s likely path home, Steve and I wind our way around the crescent-shaped Upper Belgrave Street. Although I’ve often had trouble getting inside Gray’s head, I feel certain I know how he felt while taking this walk on September 11, 1858: in a word, elated. The first review of his book had been published. Of “Mr. Gray’s ‘Anatomy,’” The Lancet editors declared, using the abbreviated title by which it would become known, “we may say with truth, that there is not a treatise in any language, in which the relations of anatomy and surgery are so clearly and fully shown.” Indeed, “it is impossible to speak in any terms excepting those of the highest commendation. The descriptions are admirably clear, and the illustrations, copied from recent dissections, are perfect.”

Though they had no quibble with the Anatomy per se, the editors, as if anticipating the book’s success, felt compelled to issue a word of warning on anatomy texts in general: “No book, however ably written and accurately illustrated, can ever enable the student to dispense with the necessity of the actual dissection of the human body, and the study of disease at the bedside…. The student who trusts solely to books, however excellent they may be, will find himself, in the hour of trial, theoretically learned but practically inefficient.” With that said, the review of the 782-page Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical closed on a high note: “As a full, systematic, and advanced treatise on anatomy…we are not acquainted with any work in any language which can take equal rank with the one before us.” And what a steal at twenty-eight shillings!

It is the kind of review a writer dreams of bringing home to Mom. Which is exactly what Henry did, I have no doubt. At thirty-one, he was the last of the Gray children still living at the family home with their widowed mother, Ann, now sixty-six. Thomas, the eldest, had been married for thirteen years and, by this point, had fathered eight of his ten children. Though barely a breath is known of Henry’s two older sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, they were both presumably married by this time. Tragically, Henry’s only younger sibling had died three months earlier. At age twenty-seven, Robert Gray, a seaman aboard the merchant vessel Indomitable, had perished at sea on May 23, 1858.

Steve and I approach the south end of Wilton Street and take a left.

We find Henry Gray’s home not by the number on the door but by a plaque embedded in the mustard-colored brick on the second story, one of the London County Council’s distinctive round markers designating a historical landmark:

HENRY

~GRAY~

1827–1861

ANATOMIST