The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [99]
If one were looking just at H. V. Carter’s curriculum vitae, his interest in leprosy would seem to have sprung directly from that mound of raw data. Perhaps he had also encountered cases in Satara, one might surmise. But, in fact, a casual mention in his diary a decade earlier shows that Carter had begun looking into leprosy long before. From a public health perspective, there were certainly compelling reasons for him to study leprosy, but I am sure it resonated in a personal way as well. Leprosy is invoked many times in the Bible—the prophet Elisha bathing a leper, the parable of Lazarus, Jesus and his disciples healing the afflicted—and the chance to make an impact on the lives of lepers would have struck him as a worthy, Christlike endeavor.
After completing his term in Satara, Carter was granted a three-year furlough, which he used to conduct a fact-finding mission on how cases of leprosy were managed in other countries. He traveled to western Turkey and southern Europe but spent much of his time in Norway. During this remarkably productive period, 1872—75, Carter also wrote two influential books, both of which he illustrated: a monograph on mycetoma (1874) and a volume on leprosy (1874), one of the first scientific treatises on the disease. What makes this latter book historically significant is Carter’s advocacy for the findings of a fellow scientist, Gerhard Hansen, whom he had met during his furlough. Hansen, a Norwegian physician, had accumulated convincing evidence that leprosy was caused by an acquired bacterial infection and was not, therefore, a hereditary disease, as was widely believed and reported at the time. Carter’s book included translations of two of Hansen’s latest research papers (the first time they would appear in English), which helped disseminate the findings to a broad scientific audience.1
Six years later, H. V. Carter had the stage to himself. The setting was London, August 1881. At age fifty, he stood before an audience composed of the leading scientists of the day, delegates to the seventh International Congress of Medicine, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and Joseph Lister, among them. These men were his peers. (And they were exclusively men. Queen Victoria, fiercely opposed to equal rights for women, had threatened to withdraw her royal patronage if any “medical women” were admitted to the congress.) Carter, now the principal of Grant Medical College, head physician of the Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy Hospital, and a surgeon-major in the Indian Medical Service, had earned a spot in “the genus” above, to borrow his earlier phrasing, whether or not he saw himself thusly. He had been invited here to give an address on his recent discovery of the organism that caused “relapsing fever,” an often deadly illness that had swept through Bombay during the Great Indian Famine of 1877, and on his related findings on another blood-borne bacterium. This body of research, which would become the subject of Carter’s next book, a treatise of nearly five hundred pages, had already cemented his reputation as one of the world’s leading experts in epidemic disease. By now, the fact that H. V. Carter was the original illustrator of Gray’s Anatomy, currently in its ninth edition in England, had become just