The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [98]
Harriet, it turns out, was not the only bearer of news about H. V. Carter and family. Lily also received delightfully chatty letters from her niece, Harriet and H.V.’s daughter, Eliza Harriet “Lily” Carter. In one of the four surviving letters, we hear for the first time about her half brother, Harriet’s heretofore unnamed son, John, who was a couple of years older. Around age twenty, John ran off to Australia, perhaps seeking his fortune in the gold trade. “Let us hope that no news is good news, and that he is doing well in Australia, for we think he is still there,” Eliza tells her aunt. “We often hear of boys who behaved in a similar way and yet came to no harm.” John’s ultimate fate is unknown.
A charming instance of her father’s acting fatherly comes in a letter dated October 3, 1878. Writing from Switzerland, Eliza and her mother are en route to Florence, where she would spend the winter studying Italian and taking painting and voice lessons, she tells her “Auntie” Lily, “to try and satisfy dear Papa’s wishes in occupying my time in ‘the pursuit of knowledge.’” Her groaning lifts right off the page. From the sound of it, H.V., in spite of his absence, was trying to instill in Eliza his own love of learning, and she was reacting with all the enthusiasm of a typical teenager.
By this point, Carter’s work for the Indian Medical Service had taken him out of the classroom entirely, and in his midforties, he had found his true calling in life: independent medical research. This seems such a natural fit for Carter, but only in hindsight. When he had received his first copy of the Anatomy, he confided to his diary that he could never take on such a huge project again, unless working under a “ruling mind” such as Henry Gray—a natural leader, someone able to see the big picture, to use a modern phrase. Of himself, Carter wrote, “[I] analyze life on too small a scale.” What he meant as a putdown, however, I see as his great gift. Carter’s ability to focus on the small, to break things down, to mentally dissect—the same ability that made him so miserable on personal inspection—is what made him such a precise anatomical artist and such a natural researcher. This man who so firmly believed “I can’t” is now recognized by medical historians as a pioneer, the first scientist to apply modern methods of scientific research to the investigation of tropical diseases.
CARTER’S FIRST SIGNIFICANT finding as a researcher dates back to 1860, when he was still teaching at Grant Medical College. His clinical observation of a condition known at the time as “Madura foot” had deeply troubled him. The disease seemed to afflict only poor Indian laborers, who, for reasons unknown, developed enormously painful and disabling masses in their feet and/or hands. No treatment was effective, short of amputation. Puzzled, Carter began examining surgical specimens with the microscope he had brought with him from London, and he became convinced that the culprit was a fungus of some kind. Since the laborers worked in their bare feet or with bare hands, the organism, Carter theorized, must be entering through cuts in the skin. Though unable to prove this by growing cultures of the fungus, he published his research, and two decades later, his theory was confirmed. Madura foot eventually came to be known by a new name, “Carter’s mycetoma.”
After five years at the college, Carter was relocated one hundred miles south of Bombay to the district of Satara and was appointed the “civil surgeon” (chief medical officer) and superintendent to the “gaol” (jail). He spent nine years here. Not one letter written by Carter survives from this entire period, giving the spooky impression that he had been locked away himself, but the reality is, he kept himself as busy as possible. On top of his other duties, for instance, he volunteered for what sounds like a daunting task: analyzing data that had been collected on eighty-two hundred Indian lepers but was simply gathering dust in government