The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [9]
I tear a piece of scrap paper to mark this page and nearly give Ms. Wheat a coronary. Her expression is somewhere between cat-in-bathwater and teacher-on-edge. With a pursed expression, she promptly delivers to my left hand a pile of precut page markers.
I had brought with me to the library my copy of Gray’s (a 1901 facsimile) so I could compare them side by side. What’s immediately obvious is that hundreds of drawings by a different artist were added to the later version, although, even without the benefit of credits, it is easy for me to tell whose work was whose. When the book was first published, the British medical journal The Lancet, typically not one to rave, praised it as the best anatomy treatise “in any language” and called Henry Vandyke Carter’s illustrations “perfect.” Indeed, they are perfect, both exquisitely wrought and functional. His great innovation was to place the anatomical names right on the parts themselves, like street names on a road map—in spots, terms even curve right along with the anatomy—something students found enormously helpful. By comparison with Carter’s originals, the added drawings look blunt and diagrammatic. The most striking difference, however, is the first edition’s lack of color, which I am surprised to discover I favor. Carter’s drawing of the man in profile—the image that first captured my attention—is more beautiful in the original, where it appears not on the cover but a third of the way into the text. Seeing it as Carter intended is like seeing a masterpiece restored. And the colored version—how have I not noticed this before?—now looks garish.
Not surprisingly, I find subtle text differences between the 1858 and 1901 editions; in the latter, words are substituted, sentences shortened, punctuation changed. As a result, the book, already clinical in tone, was made even chillier. In the original, Henry Gray often provided brief introductory remarks for each section, which set a welcoming tone. Forty-three years later, his remarks were gone.
One thing is exactly the same in both editions: the book comes to an abrupt conclusion. It is almost as though Professor Henry Gray, in the midst of lecturing, sees that he has gone past his allotted time. His words quickly grind to a halt—“…and receives a prolongation from it.” And that’s that. Class dismissed. In the first edition, however, two last words appear, in tiny print:
THE END.
As I sit in the library, those two little words sound wonderfully ironic. Could Henry Gray ever have imagined what “The End” would begin, the long life his work would enjoy? Having never gone out of print, it has to date seen thirty-five editions in the United States alone. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages, been pored over by generation after generation of medical students, and sold millions of copies.
I try to imagine what was going through his head when, early in 1858, Henry put the finishing touches to his tome. I picture him sitting at a meticulously organized desk in the Gray family home on Wilton Street, where he lived alone with his widowed mother. The hundreds of handwritten manuscript pages are stacked in a neat tower, ready to be boxed up for his publisher, when the thirty-one-year-old gets bitten by whimsy. He pulls out a fresh sheet of paper and, with his most careful calligraphy, writes those two last words. He slips this final page into the bottom of the stack. He does not expect it to survive the editing process; this is his attempt at a little joke. “The End”? Yeah, right. A book ends, a story ends, a life ends. But the desire to study anatomy never will.
Two
IN BOOKS