the course his life will take.
For Carter, keeping a diary had been intended originally as a character-building exercise, a good “habit” for a young man to keep (good habits being prophylaxis against bad ones). For me, deciphering his diary has been like performing a dissection in reverse—a slow piecing together. The process has required spending numerous hours in the microfilm reading room at the library, where Steve and I have gotten to know the tics and quirks of each microfilm projector and become familiar with the microfilm-reading regulars. Those of us who gather there are an odd little community of time travelers. Most everyone reads newspapers, an old-fashioned pastime made more so by the age of the newspapers themselves—antique issues of the London
Times,
say, or a monthlong run of the defunct
Chicago Herald.
Steve and I are not so different. The daily news we’re reading just happens to be in the form of a diary.
In what now reads like an epigraph, Carter started his diary with an aphorism that sounds as if it were taken from a Victorian-era self-improvement book: “Let the same thing, or the same duty, return at the same time everyday, it will soon become pleasant.” He would frame each entry, beginning with the time he woke, closing with his bedtime, and capturing the hours in between in a few deft lines. Just as a painted portrait acquires depth and texture with the accretion of paint, an image of H. V. Carter emerges only after many weeks of entries. A serious, disciplined young man, he reads the Bible and prays daily, and goes to church—often twice—on Sundays, but he is also only seventeen years old and had moved from a town of ten thousand to one of more than a million, so naturally a boyish excitement bursts through every so often. He is left almost speechless one day by a sighting of Queen Victoria, while a few weeks later, he is fascinated by troops practicing formations in Hyde Park. At the same time, his eyes are also being opened to unpleasant realities. On May 23, 1849, the day after his eighteenth birthday, Carter begins serving a “clinical clerkship” at the hospital, a position in which he would shadow staff surgeons and take their case notes. Just two days later, he witnesses a horrific procedure, the amputation of a boy’s leg. “Chloroform not used,” he writes that evening, which comes as a chilling reminder that anesthesia during surgery was not yet standard practice.
At times, Carter’s prose is so immediate and concise, it is as though he were dictating a telegram. “Cholera case,” he writes on July 6. “First I’ve seen. Came in yesterday 6:30 P.M. Died 6:30 P.M. today. Terrible disease.” The next day, he attends the postmortem examination of this patient and is stupefied; the man doesn’t look dead enough to be dead. (Cholera, a bacterial disease spread mainly through contaminated drinking water, causes devastating diarrhea and dehydration.) By August 1, the cholera outbreak has so overwhelmed London’s hospitals that Carter must watch as St. George’s shuts its doors to new patients.
Contrasting with entries on the latest death tolls are warm passages on his life in the home of John Sawyer. Sawyer, forty-five, the same age as Carter’s father, ran a private practice and apothecary out of his Park Street residence, and he and his wife had five daughters, ranging from nineteen years old down to six. Although Carter paid an annual fee for room and board, it is clear that he was embraced as a part of the family and that this home away from home provided much solace. On Sundays, he often joined the Sawyer family on walks through the nearby parks and spent the afternoons playing the role of indulgent big brother to the younger Sawyer children. And on Sunday evenings, he oftentimes accompanied the second eldest daughter, Mary, to chapel. Carter always comes across in his diary as a polite and proper young gentleman, never mentioning anything untoward, yet his
For Carter, keeping a diary had been intended originally as a character-building exercise, a good “habit” for a young man to keep (good habits being prophylaxis against bad ones). For me, deciphering his diary has been like performing a dissection in reverse—a slow piecing together. The process has required spending numerous hours in the microfilm reading room at the library, where Steve and I have gotten to know the tics and quirks of each microfilm projector and become familiar with the microfilm-reading regulars. Those of us who gather there are an odd little community of time travelers. Most everyone reads newspapers, an old-fashioned pastime made more so by the age of the newspapers themselves—antique issues of the London
Times,
say, or a monthlong run of the defunct
Chicago Herald.
Steve and I are not so different. The daily news we’re reading just happens to be in the form of a diary.
In what now reads like an epigraph, Carter started his diary with an aphorism that sounds as if it were taken from a Victorian-era self-improvement book: “Let the same thing, or the same duty, return at the same time everyday, it will soon become pleasant.” He would frame each entry, beginning with the time he woke, closing with his bedtime, and capturing the hours in between in a few deft lines. Just as a painted portrait acquires depth and texture with the accretion of paint, an image of H. V. Carter emerges only after many weeks of entries. A serious, disciplined young man, he reads the Bible and prays daily, and goes to church—often twice—on Sundays, but he is also only seventeen years old and had moved from a town of ten thousand to one of more than a million, so naturally a boyish excitement bursts through every so often. He is left almost speechless one day by a sighting of Queen Victoria, while a few weeks later, he is fascinated by troops practicing formations in Hyde Park. At the same time, his eyes are also being opened to unpleasant realities. On May 23, 1849, the day after his eighteenth birthday, Carter begins serving a “clinical clerkship” at the hospital, a position in which he would shadow staff surgeons and take their case notes. Just two days later, he witnesses a horrific procedure, the amputation of a boy’s leg. “Chloroform not used,” he writes that evening, which comes as a chilling reminder that anesthesia during surgery was not yet standard practice.
At times, Carter’s prose is so immediate and concise, it is as though he were dictating a telegram. “Cholera case,” he writes on July 6. “First I’ve seen. Came in yesterday 6:30 P.M. Died 6:30 P.M. today. Terrible disease.” The next day, he attends the postmortem examination of this patient and is stupefied; the man doesn’t look dead enough to be dead. (Cholera, a bacterial disease spread mainly through contaminated drinking water, causes devastating diarrhea and dehydration.) By August 1, the cholera outbreak has so overwhelmed London’s hospitals that Carter must watch as St. George’s shuts its doors to new patients.
Contrasting with entries on the latest death tolls are warm passages on his life in the home of John Sawyer. Sawyer, forty-five, the same age as Carter’s father, ran a private practice and apothecary out of his Park Street residence, and he and his wife had five daughters, ranging from nineteen years old down to six. Although Carter paid an annual fee for room and board, it is clear that he was embraced as a part of the family and that this home away from home provided much solace. On Sundays, he often joined the Sawyer family on walks through the nearby parks and spent the afternoons playing the role of indulgent big brother to the younger Sawyer children. And on Sunday evenings, he oftentimes accompanied the second eldest daughter, Mary, to chapel. Carter always comes across in his diary as a polite and proper young gentleman, never mentioning anything untoward, yet his
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