The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [87]
lived here
I had hoped we might be able to convince the current occupants to let us take a look inside, to creak the floorboards and see where Henry Gray had once resided, but clearly, no one lives here anymore. Through a ground floor window, Steve and I glimpse what looks like an abandoned renovation project. Most tellingly, the doorbell has been removed from its socket, leaving a hole in the doorframe. I rap on the door anyway—once, once more. Oh, give it another try, I tell myself. Maybe the world’s slowest carpenter is inside. “Hallooo!” I add in a friendly voice. “Hello?”
I notice another small sign of disrepair. Where a big brass house number had once obviously been nailed to the front door, as on the other homes along the street, one is now simply scribbled, a faint penciled 8. With a few strokes of an eraser, one could wipe it away. It seems like an all too apt metaphor for Gray himself: here at home one day in June 1861, gone the next, taken, virtually overnight, by sudden illness.
Steve and I cross to the other side of the street to take in the whole façade of the building. I remind myself that Gray spent countless fruitful hours within writing the book that would bring him a kind of immortality. During the last big push to complete the work, Carter often visited on Saturdays. He stood on that doorstep, rang the bell and greeted Mrs. Gray, I’d imagine, then joined Henry in his office, where they passed the afternoon working.
For all the time they spent together, I wonder how well they really knew each other. In particular, how well did Carter let himself be known? Compared to someone as “naturally clever” and accomplished as Henry Gray, a man who seemed to belong to a different “genus” altogether, Carter felt inferior. As he once put it, “The genus is not my natural one. I belong to another generic division of men—the one below.” Heaven help him, H. V. Carter believed himself to be ordinary.
The sad thing is, I don’t think Henry Gray saw him this way at all. In his preface to the book, Gray calls Carter “his friend,” which, granted, is not terribly revealing on its own. But he did leave behind one other clue as to his true opinion of H. V. Carter, and it is hidden in plain sight. In identically sized type—no doubt in accordance with his wishes—the spine of the first edition of the book reads:
GRAY
ANATOMY
CARTER
Henry saw Henry as an equal. They were and would always be two men linked by anatomy. If Carter noticed Gray’s gesture, however, he never mentions it in his diary. But then, if he saw the excellent reviews the book had garnered, not only in The Lancet but in the British Medical Journal, among others, he does not say so either. And if he were aware that sales were brisk, that the first edition of two thousand copies was well on its way to selling out, and that an American publisher had already bought the rights to the Anatomy, he keeps it all to himself. All of which has left me wondering, how exactly did he feel about the book?
Upon receiving his first copy of the Anatomy in mid-October 1858 (the book had been sent not by Henry Gray or the publisher but, oddly, by his onetime boss at the Royal College of Surgeons, dear old Mr. Queckett), Carter’s only words are: “The Book is out and looks well.” Well. It’s a muted response, to say the least. His silence makes me think he paged through it once, then put the book up on a shelf, literally and figuratively, as though it represented one long, unpleasant chapter that he just wanted to put behind him. Which could very well have been the case. In only six months, H. V. Carter’s life had changed utterly.
Though he’d had to pay for his own passage to India, Carter was officially an enlisted man. He had obtained an appointment with the Indian Medical Service, the medical corps of the British-controlled Indian Army, which, at the time, provided personnel for both civilian and military posts. Immediately upon his arrival, Carter reported to Fort George, an army post outside Bombay, where he helped treat soldiers wounded in the mutiny. Before he could