The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [93]
“Pretty good,” I reply, although I honestly have no idea what’s inside the bottle; it looks like a dog’s chew toy, microwaved.
“This is the heart of a twenty-five-year-old woman,” Sandra says. “You can see the aorta here”—she points to an eye-shaped opening—“but what’s unusual is, she had four rather than three aortic valve cusps.”
Pickled in preservatives, the heart has shrunken over time, but I can clearly see the abnormality she described.
“Would that be what killed her?” Steve asks.
“No, in fact, Gray says in his postmortem that this had never caused her any problems or even been detected. She died of typhoid or tuberculosis or something. But it was an unusual condition, which is why he preserved it.” Steve hands the heart back to Sandra, and she returns it to the shelf.
She next shows us a preserved portion of spine with two completely separated cervical vertebrae—that is, a broken neck. This is another Gray original but, unlike the heart, is still in its original container. Rather than suspended in liquid, it rests on a bed of cotton in a thick-walled glass vitrine sealed at the top with bitumen, which looks like dried black tar.
This is the closest I have ever gotten to Henry Gray himself, it strikes me as I hold the container. You could probably dust the inside of the lid for his fingerprints or open it up and hunt for one of his hairs, maybe an eyelash, and test it for his DNA. But, really, finding proof through fragments of Gray’s anatomy is not necessary. As Sandra explains, both specimens can be matched to postmortem reports written in Gray’s hand.
She heads out the door, and we follow her follow mes. Back in the archive, Nallini rejoins us, and the four of us stand before a wall lined with large leather-bound books. The topmost shelf holds what looks like a set of encyclopedias for giant children but is in fact a series of nineteenth-century postmortem reports, bound and arranged by year. Sandra had previously pulled the hefty 1858 volume, which now rests on a library cart. Nallini moves it to a nearby table, Sandra turns to a report about twenty pages in, then each takes a small step back. The two women—one pale and freckled, the other olive-skinned—wear matching expressions: Well, go ahead, take a look.
The first thing we notice is his signature, Henry Gray, underlined twice at the bottom of the page. I instantly compare it in my mind to H. V. Carter’s, whose signature is both less legible and fussier-looking; Gray’s penmanship, by contrast, is easy to read. The patient had been “under the care of Dr. Page” (a familiar name from Carter’s diary), and in describing the condition of her heart, Gray had written, “The aortic valve was composed of four flaps.” In the margin, he had noted in a smaller hand, “Specimen showing the Aortic valve is preserved in the Museum.”
Sandra allows us a moment to marvel, then tells us to flip to case number 199. Here we find a report for one “William Parry,” who, as Gray reported, had “fallen, head first, a height of about 14 feet—”
“Ouch,” I think aloud, “that would’ve hurt.”
“Not for long, though,” Steve adds. As Gray noted, Mr. Parry “had lost all power of motion or sensation in all the extremities and in the trunk of the body.” He was paralyzed and died two days after being admitted to the hospital.
Sandra has to dash off to teach a class, but Nallini invites us to pull whatever volumes we want from the wall. There are hundreds of reports by Henry Gray within these books, she tells us, and points out the two worktables on the opposite side of the room.
My first impulse is one I almost feel I should suppress: to see the postmortem report on Henry Gray himself. Without knowing why exactly, this seems ghoulish; it’s one thing to read reports on total strangers, but on someone you’ve come to know? In any event, I am spared any further