The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [94]
Suddenly, the horror of what Gray went through hits me. He must have known, from the moment he saw a patch of pustules on his body becoming confluent—meaning, running together, a continuous blistering—he would not survive. Once the pustules spread into his mouth and throat, slowly suffocating him, the end would be terrifying. Whereas his death had once seemed incredibly fast to me, coming just a week after falling ill, now it did not seem fast enough.
WE KNOW THAT he was buried in a private grave, dug to an extra-deep depth of eight feet (not due to smallpox, interestingly, but to allow for additional interments on top); that the exact time of burial was half past one o’clock on Saturday, June 15, 1861; and that the total burial cost was £7.3s. Keith Nicol has all the documentation from the London Cemetery Company. We also know that a woman named Ellen Connor—a private nurse, in all likelihood—was present at the time of death. This fact is listed on Henry Gray’s death certificate, a copy of which was easy enough for Keith to track down at the General Register Office. We know, too, that Gray had apparently contracted smallpox from the nephew he had been treating. Still, Steve, Keith, and I find ourselves puzzled by the most basic question about Gray’s death. As the death certificate clearly states, he had been “vaccinated in childhood” against smallpox, so why did he become ill?
“I think the reason Henry fell prey to it,” Keith suggests, “is that he’d been nursing Charles for so long and he was literally exhausted.” Gray’s work ethic may have also played a role. “Because he was such a hard worker as well, perhaps his general strength wasn’t a hundred percent.” Plus, “We just don’t know how good or effective the smallpox vaccine was back then.” Perhaps he should have been vaccinated again, as an adult?
Another possibility, I offer, is that the strain was especially virulent. “But if so, how did his little nephew survive?”
“Maybe he didn’t get it from the nephew,” Steve counters.
Keith shrugs and smiles a sympathetic smile that says, I know, I know. I’ve been dealing with questions like this for fifteen years.
As we speak, we are surrounded by the product of Keith’s labors: dozens of binders containing the research he had gathered for his Henry Gray chronology. Some are still lined up on bookshelves here in his home office, but most lie in piles around us. Our visit to Keith’s South London home was meant to be purely social, a chance to get acquainted over a cup of tea. But other than learning that he is an uncommonly gracious man, that he has two grown daughters, and that he is tall, bearded, and “of 1956 vintage,” I do not know a lot more about Keith personally than I did before we arrived. Instead, we have spent the last three hours going through the binders and hashing out the two Henrys. This no doubt reveals a lot about the two of us. Keith was first drawn to the history of Gray, and I, to the mystery. Our research paths have taken us in different directions, mine straight to Carter, his circling lesser known figures at St. George’s. But in the end, it is the story of Gray that brings us together. Here we are, in the dying light of a humid October afternoon, trying to re-create the anatomist’s final days.
I tell Keith that Steve and I had spent the morning at St. George’s and mention the likelihood that an autopsy had not been performed—
It wasn’t just Henry Gray that was potentially infectious, Keith points out. “With smallpox, the blisters would have a very watery discharge inside them, and the skin would be stretched to such an extent that the slightest touch would break it. It would then burst as an aerosol into the air. Eventually, once the smallpox was confluent,