great work, his
Anatomy.
I picture an intimate gathering, with Dr. Brodie personally introducing Henry to a few distinguished colleagues, the young man’s eyes as round as the Wedgwood plates as he shook hand after hand. But why would Sir Benjamin and Lady Brodie have invited this young nobody to their Savile Row residence? Well, it turns out, Gray had won a prestigious “junior prize” in anatomy as a sixteen-year-old, and the lad’s burgeoning talent had clearly impressed Dr. Tatum. Indeed, it was Tatum who, the following week, would cosign Henry Gray’s registration as a medical student.
But there’s a final reason I hope this early date was in fact their first meeting, for the warm invitation would serve as a prologue of sorts to Gray’s career just as another note from Brodie would serve, sixteen years later, as a fitting epilogue. Upon receiving news of Henry’s sudden passing, Dr. Brodie, at age seventy-eight and in failing health, wrote to a colleague: “I am most grieved about poor Gray. His death, just as he was on the point of obtaining the reward of his talents,…is a great loss to the Hospital and the School.
“Who is there to take his place?”
HENRY VANDYKE CARTER prepared for the first day of his first year of dissection in the same way a student today would: he shopped. After taking a quick look around the new laboratory at Kinnerton Street, the eighteen-year-old went and placed an order for a dissecting “gown,” a kind of loose cassock (a precursor to the green cotton scrubs of today), and then headed to Savigny & Co. and bought a “case of scalpels,” he reports in his diary on Saturday, September 29, 1849. Carter could not afford a copy of the standard anatomy guide, Quain’s
Elements of Anatomy
—“Funds low,” he notes in his usual clipped style—so he would just have to make do without.
The winter session would begin with speeches and an awards ceremony on Monday, and lectures and lab work on Tuesday. Carter, who had spent the past year and a half sitting through classes in anatomy, botany, physiology, chemistry, materia medica, and medical jurisprudence, would finally get his hands bloodied. “All prepared,” he writes before bedtime Monday night.
But it takes two to take the next step. “Not dissect for subject not ready,” he writes the following day (“subject” meaning cadaver), which may have been for the best since Carter’s gown was not ready yet either. Finally, on Wednesday, October 3, he makes his debut as an anatomist. Under the watchful eye of Dr. Athol Johnson, he begins with a part of the body both relatively simple to dissect and, if you picture Michelangelo’s
David
as the ideal, lovely to behold: the inguinal canal, the area where the lower abdominal muscles slope down toward the groin. At the close of the day, Carter confides: “[I] like dissecting. More difficult than [I’d have] thought without guide.”
This last little admission is the kind of ironic detail that brings a smile to my lips, knowing as I do the role H. V. Carter will go on to play in creating the most famous anatomy guide of the past two centuries. Another such moment comes three pages later, with the first mention of Henry Gray. So synonymous has the name
Gray
become with
anatomy
—as familiar a pairing as
Webster
and
dictionary
—that it is jarring to see it spelled incorrectly, as Carter does on October 31, 1849. The error is unusual for him, an impeccable speller otherwise, and suggests that the two men did not know each other well yet. As for the mention—“See Grey, promise” is all he writes—it makes no sense to me. But that’s fine; it is part of the odd dynamic that develops between diarist and reader as the lopsided omniscience borne by both gets traded back and forth. Which is to say that at any given moment, on any given day, Carter experiences far more than he ever puts into words, just as I, on any given page, know far more than he about
Anatomy.
I picture an intimate gathering, with Dr. Brodie personally introducing Henry to a few distinguished colleagues, the young man’s eyes as round as the Wedgwood plates as he shook hand after hand. But why would Sir Benjamin and Lady Brodie have invited this young nobody to their Savile Row residence? Well, it turns out, Gray had won a prestigious “junior prize” in anatomy as a sixteen-year-old, and the lad’s burgeoning talent had clearly impressed Dr. Tatum. Indeed, it was Tatum who, the following week, would cosign Henry Gray’s registration as a medical student.
But there’s a final reason I hope this early date was in fact their first meeting, for the warm invitation would serve as a prologue of sorts to Gray’s career just as another note from Brodie would serve, sixteen years later, as a fitting epilogue. Upon receiving news of Henry’s sudden passing, Dr. Brodie, at age seventy-eight and in failing health, wrote to a colleague: “I am most grieved about poor Gray. His death, just as he was on the point of obtaining the reward of his talents,…is a great loss to the Hospital and the School.
“Who is there to take his place?”
HENRY VANDYKE CARTER prepared for the first day of his first year of dissection in the same way a student today would: he shopped. After taking a quick look around the new laboratory at Kinnerton Street, the eighteen-year-old went and placed an order for a dissecting “gown,” a kind of loose cassock (a precursor to the green cotton scrubs of today), and then headed to Savigny & Co. and bought a “case of scalpels,” he reports in his diary on Saturday, September 29, 1849. Carter could not afford a copy of the standard anatomy guide, Quain’s
Elements of Anatomy
—“Funds low,” he notes in his usual clipped style—so he would just have to make do without.
The winter session would begin with speeches and an awards ceremony on Monday, and lectures and lab work on Tuesday. Carter, who had spent the past year and a half sitting through classes in anatomy, botany, physiology, chemistry, materia medica, and medical jurisprudence, would finally get his hands bloodied. “All prepared,” he writes before bedtime Monday night.
But it takes two to take the next step. “Not dissect for subject not ready,” he writes the following day (“subject” meaning cadaver), which may have been for the best since Carter’s gown was not ready yet either. Finally, on Wednesday, October 3, he makes his debut as an anatomist. Under the watchful eye of Dr. Athol Johnson, he begins with a part of the body both relatively simple to dissect and, if you picture Michelangelo’s
David
as the ideal, lovely to behold: the inguinal canal, the area where the lower abdominal muscles slope down toward the groin. At the close of the day, Carter confides: “[I] like dissecting. More difficult than [I’d have] thought without guide.”
This last little admission is the kind of ironic detail that brings a smile to my lips, knowing as I do the role H. V. Carter will go on to play in creating the most famous anatomy guide of the past two centuries. Another such moment comes three pages later, with the first mention of Henry Gray. So synonymous has the name
Gray
become with
anatomy
—as familiar a pairing as
Webster
and
dictionary
—that it is jarring to see it spelled incorrectly, as Carter does on October 31, 1849. The error is unusual for him, an impeccable speller otherwise, and suggests that the two men did not know each other well yet. As for the mention—“See Grey, promise” is all he writes—it makes no sense to me. But that’s fine; it is part of the odd dynamic that develops between diarist and reader as the lopsided omniscience borne by both gets traded back and forth. Which is to say that at any given moment, on any given day, Carter experiences far more than he ever puts into words, just as I, on any given page, know far more than he about
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