The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [1]
A lengthwise cut was made along the inner face of the forearm, followed by two transverse incisions across the wrist and the elbow. The skin was peeled open, the two flaps of it pinned to ensure it did not slip back into place. Thus invited, the people of Glasgow looked into the meat of Mathew Clydesdale’s arm, and as they did so they whispered to one another, and trembled in fascination, or horror, or wonder.
The muscles were raw, a brownish red; the bone, overlaid by them and by the straps of pale tendon, yellowish. There was little blood, for his heart had been stilled some time ago.
“Expose the cervical vertebrae, if you would,” Ure murmured to his assistants, and while they tipped Clydesdale’s head forward and went to work on the back of his neck, Ure bent over the exposed machinery of the arm. He probed with a short rod, and used it to elevate slightly from amongst the meat and the gristle a set of cord-like structures, somewhat grey beneath the scraps of tissue and congealed blood that adhered to them.
“Here are the nerves,” he proclaimed to his rapt audience. He shifted his hand a little, letting all but one of the nerves fall back into their corporeal bed. “And this is the ulnar, the first to which we shall direct our attentions.”
At Ure’s instruction, the trolley that carried the tall pile of metal plates was wheeled into position beside the corpse. Ure took up one of the long metal rods attached to the apparatus and inserted it through the new opening in the back of Clydesdale’s neck. Once satisfied of its position, he held it there, and raised the second rod. He looked up to the crowded benches with a grave expression.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen. Observe.”
He slipped the second rod into Clydesdale’s gaping arm; adjusted it, eased it into contact with the ulnar nerve.
And Clydesdale’s arm spasmed. The dead hand that rested palm up on his knee twitched, the fingers clenched. There were gasps, and screams, and a shuddering of alarm. A few cheers. A few hands clapped. Ure withdrew the rod, then reinserted it. Again the fingers trembled and closed, as if trying to grasp at the life so recently extinct.
A woman near the end of one of the rows, midway up the auditorium, fainted away. She was half-carried, half-dragged from her seat and through the crowd to one of the doors, in search of reviving air.
Satisfied, Ure pushed back Clydesdale’s head and turned it to one side. He nodded to his colleagues, and they set to work, cutting open the skin of the lower neck, pulling it away from the underlying structure of veins and muscles. Once they stood back, Ure delicately set the tip of a rod against a deep-buried fibrous thread.
“The phrenic nerve,” he announced.
And the corpse’s chest heaved. Clydesdale’s whole inanimate form shifted as his ribcage rose and fell in a dreadful parody of breathing. More exclamations of amazement, and of horror. Some of those watching averted their eyes, or closed them, their morbid fascination exceeded by repulsion and unease.
“You see,” Ure said calmly and clearly, “that the mechanism of breathing remains intact after death, lacking only the animating force by which it was formerly enlivened.”
Though his voice was steady, his face was flushed with excitement, for he was as captivated as any by the wonders he performed.
And so the demonstration proceeded. The leg was made to straighten, jerking and kicking as if during a fit. A rod inserted into a notch cut above the orbit of Clydesdale’s left eye made his face contort and convulse in a mad dance of lopsided expression. At that, another woman was overcome, and helped from the chamber. Two men departed, one after the other, each pale of visage and with a hand pressed over his mouth. One was already gagging as he made for the door.
At the conclusion of Ure’s work, another white-clad figure, Professor Jeffray, took charge. He had the dead man laid out on a flat trolley, where he dissected out his every inner working, breaking open the ribcage to reveal