The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [92]
So where has this left him?
I still occupy rooms at the Hope Hotel—
A name that seems sadly ironic by now.
Sold the furniture and paid most of the debts. Now, have almost nothing in hand. Have written to Scarborough, only saying all had left, but giving no reason. It was understood she is to have £150 a year, no [formal] agreement made of any kind, but by not overfair means she has possession of the Marriage certificate. Talked largely of getting a divorce someway.
Carter writes only two more entries after this, one in January and the last in March 1862. He doesn’t run out of room; in fact, he leaves more than a hundred pages blank in the diary. He simply stops. In my experience, that is how it usually goes. A diary does not come to a neat, tidy ending. The diarist just doesn’t show up one day.
Fifteen
IN A WORKING-CLASS NEIGHBORHOOD IN SOUTHWEST LONDON, forty minutes by tube from the site of the original building, stands the current St. George’s Hospital. There is no grand façade. No columns, no marble, no tourists. The modernist architecture of today’s St. George’s is straight out of the 1970s, uninspired and un-memorable. On the other hand, just as in the days of Gray and Carter, the building doubles as a general hospital and a teaching hospital and, fortunately for my purposes, contains a small archive of historical material as part of its medical library. Even better, St. George’s has Nallini Thevakarrunai, the “library cataloger,” as she describes herself (archivist, I would call her), who has been the soul of patience in answering my many questions via e-mail about the hospital’s history.
Upon receiving her responses back home, I often thought, What a beautiful name: Nuh-lee-nee Thu-vak-ar-roo-na; it sounds like a musical phrase spelled phonetically. And upon meeting her in person in the St. George’s library, I find she exudes a similar quality, pleasant and serene. Nallini is originally from Sri Lanka and has worked for the hospital for almost thirty years, she tells Steve and me, which presents a mystery as she does not look a day over forty. She shows us a few historic items displayed in the library (including the hide of “Blossom,” the cowpox-infected cow that was the source for the first human smallpox vaccination in 1796), then leads us down a back stairwell to the archive, a small bunker of a room in the hospital basement.
Nallini mentions that she wants to let Dr. Gibson know we have arrived. Moments after she makes a call, a red-haired thunderbolt enters the room: Sandra Gibson, heir to the title once held by Henry Gray, curator of the Anatomy Museum, and a professor of biology at the medical school. After a quick volley of hellos, Dr. Gibson says, “Did Nallini tell you yet?!” Too excited to wait for an answer, she continues in her Irish lilt, “Nallini said you were coming today, so I did some looking, and I found two specimens that I can link to Henry Gray.” The museum has only a few specimens dating from the 1850s, she adds, but by digging into old records and checking against Gray’s actual postmortem reports, she had confirmed their authenticity.
It’s fair to say, I am pretty shocked, knowing that the original St. George’s Anatomy Museum had been destroyed during the Blitz. I didn’t think any specimens had survived.
Eager to share her discovery, Sandra leads us across the hallway to “the museum,” although, as she is quick to concede, museum is too fancy a word for the place. It is a large room filled with sturdy shelves holding hundreds of containers—bottles and vitrines—containing anatomical specimens. This is a teaching collection, Sandra explains, a resource for