The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [89]
Grant Medical College, Bombay, c. 1905
Curiosity keeps us in the queue. We pass muster in our separate interviews. And by midafternoon, Steve and I are being admitted to the Oriental and India Office Collections reading room, the kind of place for which the phrase inner sanctum was coined. Everything about the room, from the tasteful furnishings and hushed atmosphere to the tweed-jacket-wearing patrons, screams scholarly—in the quietest, English-accented voice, of course.
More waiting ensues, as the requested album has to be procured, but soon we are ushered into a small, climate-controlled viewing room. We take a seat as Helen the librarian places a large archival box before us. Helen returns to her post at the door.
With the first pictures, our patience is rewarded. Here is one extraordinary, richly detailed picture after another—the college’s grounds, the “J.J.” hospital, the operating theater, the dissecting room, and other sites, all of which appear as dramatically different from St. George’s as Bombay is from London. Even the cadavers look different, being dark-skinned rather than ghostly white. In one photo, we can practically feel the tropical heat of Bombay. These are museum-quality prints, wonderful to see and perfect in every way except one: Carter is definitely not in them. The photos were taken too late.
Students of anatomy, Grant Medical College, c. 1905
Regrouping back in the reading room, with only a couple of hours before closing, Steve and I request the library’s one other item specifically related to Grant Medical College: a series of annual reports from the latter half of the nineteenth century. I feel as if we are scraping the bottom of the research barrel here. Having written annual reports myself, I think of them as little more than pro forma, ghostwritten exercises in community relations. But as Steve points out, aren’t annual reports always filled with pictures?
Well, these aren’t—not a single photo to speak of—though they are filled with enough facts and financial statements to qualify them as standard specimens of the genre. But one of them does contain something I had never expected. In the report for academic year 1859-60, Carter himself submitted a tidy overview of the Anatomy Department. Sounding appropriately officious, he began with the requisite statistics (one hundred lectures had been provided, thirty-three weekly exams, et cetera); followed with a tart review of the twenty-two anatomy students’ work in the dissecting room (“satisfactory,” though, in general, “their assiduity and zeal” lessened noticeably toward year’s end); and closed with a note about how the course had been organized. “The order of subjects in descriptive anatomy has been generally conformed to that of the textbook, Quain’s, or [a new one] which is becoming a favourite book with students, Gray’s Anatomy, and without vanity I may say that the figures in the latter work are calculated to greatly assist students.”
Blink and you’ll miss it. I might have myself, had Steve not read ahead and put his finger right on it—
“There’s your answer,” he whispers, pointing to Carter’s final sentence.
And sure enough, that is the answer to how Carter truly felt about Gray’s Anatomy. He hadn’t shelved the book; he was using it. He was proud of it. And he was clearly pleased to see it “becoming a favourite” with students. I am sure it pleased him, too, to see the footnote added to his report by the school’s principal: “Dr. Carter is the author of the beautiful plates by which Gray’s Anatomy is illustrated.”
Along with this unexpected find comes a thorny narrative dilemma. This is where I want to stop the story. Here is where I want to leave H. V. Carter, with a happy ending: at age twenty-nine, having found fulfilling work and having finally found that