The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy (10 page)

The musculature of the back goes four layers deep. Leaving one side of our cadaver intact, we carefully dissect the other, exposing the intermediate and then the deep back muscles. Within an hour, we have reached the very core of the body, the long, vertical erector spinae muscles lying in grooves on each side of the spinal column. These are the primary “good posture” muscles, vital to keeping our backs erect, and, indeed, they do look powerful. I pull out my notepad to jot down my observations, though my impulse is not to describe the muscles but to draw them, to rough out a map of the back. In truth, my sketch looks like something scribbled in the middle of the night while half-asleep—a doodle from a dream. But when I get home and check it against my own back in the bathroom mirror—shirt off, sketch in one hand, hand mirror in the other—I can see the same shapes under my skin.

Wonderful,
I think.
I have the back of a sixty-two-year-old female truck driver.

I feel faintly ridiculous doing this but still find it cool. I angle for a look at my lower back and, in the act of turning the mirror, turn back thirty years. Clear as can be, I see myself at fifteen in my bedroom in the basement of my childhood home in Spokane: using the blue plastic hand mirror I’ve borrowed from my sisters’ bathroom, I am trying to get a look at my lats in the full-length mirror on the back of my door. Scattered on the floor in front of me are the following items: a set of free weights, a recent Christmas present from my parents; the
Universal Bodybuilding
manual that came with it; a cloth measuring tape lifted from Mom’s sewing table; and my journal, which, since starting my weight-lifting regime, doubles as a training diary.

I had discovered weight lifting just five months earlier in freshman PE. To my own surprise, I’d found that I was naturally pretty strong, more so than most of the boys, so I had kept at it. This was probably the closest I had ever come to being good at a sport. Though I was not a “ninety-pound weakling,” I also wasn’t tall or self-confident or immune to being picked on. Making myself bigger would be a way to repel certain boys and, had I been truly honest with myself at the time, maybe a way to attract certain others.

I could already tell I was making gains with the weights. The proof was right there in my journal, where, along with my written entries, I had been charting my “stats”—measurements of my chest size, biceps, calves, even my neck. And it still is there, I find after digging up those old spiral notebooks, each one dated and signed upon completion. Though I hadn’t looked at any of my journals in a good five years, my response had not changed since the last time: I would be mortified if someone were to read these.
Burn ’em, for God’s sake,
I tell myself,
the whole box, right now.
But I know I could not strike the match. Like H. V. Carter, who lived to old age yet never parted with his diaries, I expect I will do the same.

To someone who has never kept one, this may be the hardest part to understand: why save a source of embarrassment? And for the diarist, this may be tough to explain. The attachment is not entirely logical; nor is sentimentality alone the motive. You come to anthropomorphize this extension of yourself. However raw the day, the diary absorbs every word, every ache or joy, its blank pages inviting ever more confession. Whether it is a gilded leather-bound volume or a simple file on your laptop, the idea of destroying the diary becomes increasingly unthinkable. It would be like throwing away pieces of flesh from your
own
body. Still, that’s only half the explanation. The truth is, when you’re writing a diary, a part of you hopes it will be read someday. At the very least, you are writing for that unique someone who will be the perfect reader, who will devour your sentences and
understand:
your future self.

The diary of H. V. Carter, January 1851

When the nineteen-year-old Carter writes on January 3, 1851, that he had gotten “shaved” that day for the very first time, it seems like something I would have done, right down to the six exclamation marks he uses to punctuate the announcement. Though diaries do not come with rules, all diarists know to record such events, the experience of the new, the starting points. Some of Carter’s firsts are unfortunate, as when he falls asleep during a lecture and, even worse, snores. (“Never did so in life before! Humiliating!”) Some firsts are nerve-racking but exciting, such as delivering his first speech before fellow students or being called out on his “first midwifery case.” (“Labour very easy, 3 hours, disturbed not.”) Some are sweet, such as his first secret rendezvous with a girl. And some find him a witness to history, as at the opening of the Great Exhibition, the first world’s fair, presided over by Prince Albert and held under the soaring glass arches of the Crystal Palace, not far from Kinnerton Street.

In the life of every diarist, the first of the year is a high holy day, a time for reflecting, for resolving, and, inevitably, for renewing your commitment to your diary. As expected, H. V. Carter—overachiever and micromanager that he was—goes to greater lengths than most would on this occasion. He completes a month-by-month breakdown of the year past, the highs and the lows, cross-referenced to the relevant day, as well as providing his typical summation of the day itself. On Wednesday, January 1, 1851, for instance, he notes that he stopped by the hospital in the morning, read several chapters of the recently serialized
David Copperfield
in the afternoon, went to church, then read some more, and that was pretty much it. “Not very auspicious opening of New Year!” he signs off, as if yawning at his lackadaisical day.

But no, that was not the complete story. In fact, on this day, Carter had begun keeping a secret from his keeper of secrets, a discovery I made quite by chance.

UPON TEARING OPEN
the large envelope from the Wellcome Library in London, my first thought was,
Oh no, they made a mistake.
The document I ordered had clearly been reduced during the photocopying. How had they not noticed? H. V. Carter’s handwriting was almost too small to read. And on closer inspection, I could make out just enough to wonder if they had sent me the wrong document altogether.

Manuscript number 5819 was described in the archive inventory as a record of Carter’s thoughts on his “religious life as a Dissenter”—his allegiance, that is, to a church other than the Anglican Church, the official Church of England. The document was just fifty loose pages, so I had requested photocopies rather than microfilm. What I held in my hands, though, was not the religious tract I had expected. Rather, it was a diary. Another diary. A shadow diary, of sorts, which Carter had started just as the clock struck midnight on January 1, 1851.

He didn’t call it a diary, however. He christened it
Reflections,
a name meant to evoke the more meditative and philosophical bent of this endeavor. But the name would prove to be even more apt than he could have realized.

Here, in a startling change from his usual writing voice, Carter addresses himself in the second person, as if he were looking in a mirror and his reflection yells back.

“You have capabilities which you may reasonably suppose are rather above ordinary,” the diary begins. “And how have you used them?” He then excoriates himself for having failed to keep his “invincible” resolutions of the previous year as well as for his immoral behavior—having a foul mouth, habitually lying, losing his temper. Carter is harder on himself than usual but also much more candid. “Your mind,” he writes, “[has been] polluted with constant visions of a sensual character,” especially at night. And this “loose kind of flirting” you’re engaging in with John Sawyer’s daughter Mary is “unworthy of a student.” You are “deceiving yourself and her, and her parents,” and, worst of all, have “no proper end in view.”

“Really? Mary Sawyer?” I murmured when first reading this.
I thought you two just played chess together.

In spite of his suffering, I was euphoric. I felt as if my rapport with this man from another century had suddenly transformed, deepened. I had earned his trust, and now he was letting down his guard, completely.

Truth is, this had not just happened over the course of a few pages. By this point, I had already logged countless hours poring over hundreds of Carter’s daily entries. With Steve’s code-breaking help, I’d figured out when H.V.’s
H
s meant Hewett or Hawkins or Harland; that he used the German character β to indicate a double
s;
and that nearly every written word ending in
y
ran right into the next word, without a break. I had gone with H.V. the first morning he swam in the Serpentine, the winding artificial lake in nearby Hyde Park, and on every single dip thereafter. I had ridden with the young doctor in the brougham to his first case as surgeon’s assistant. He had hardly said a word then. And I had endured, as had H.V., many a “dull m.” (dull morning). But at last, all that time spent in front of the microfilm projector at the library was paying off.

In one respect, though, I realized I had been misled. I’d gotten used to seeing his diary pages filling the view screen when, in fact, the photocopies showed both the true size of both diaries—a mere 18½ by 11½ centimeters, or about 7 by 4½ inches—and the scale of his handwriting. My word, the man had an ant’s penmanship! He could fit fifty lines on a single page.

Carter added to
Reflections
about every two weeks and would do so for the next four years. Unlike with his daily diary, though, these entries were never meant as an exercise in self-discipline. Rather, like the pages themselves, he was unbound here, writing long, ruminative passages that often read like memoirs. Religion definitely drives this narrative, but he never names his denomination (though it is clearly Christian), rises up to defend its tenets, or, for that matter, lashes out at the powerful Church of England. No, the lashing is always self-inflicted. In
Reflections,
Carter chronicles his efforts to reconcile his moral failings with his desire to lead a strict Christian life. While he continued to chart in his daily diary such details as his attendance at church (sometimes even three times on a Sunday), here he dug deeper, confiding about the battle raging within him between “sensuality—that great bane” and “religion—that important subject.”

By “religion” he really meant faith, an unshakable belief in God. But he really did treat faith as if it were a subject, a skill to acquire. He pursued it doggedly, as if competing for another academic prize. And this one, he
really
wanted to win. “’Tis just the same as with your ordinary studies,” he tells himself, “only even more perseverance is wanted.” At church, he would take notes during sermons, then write them out fully that evening. He would pore over the Christian tracts his mother sent him and reflect on her great purity of heart. Further, he took up a serious study of the Bible, “comparing texts with a view to getting
precise
knowledge.” And herein lay a crucial flaw in Carter’s efforts: he was trying to
know
his way to faith, a feat no more possible than thinking your way to love.

The harder Carter tried to feel God’s presence, the more elusive God seemed to become. One evening in July 1851, he writes, “You had reason to think the Holy Spirit had roused you, but alas, an amazing and fearful backsliding has occurred.” In the twelve days leading up to this confession, he had tallied an entire “column of filthy sins,” while at the same time, all “thoughts of God” were “absent.” And for this, he entirely blamed himself.

Carter did have faith in some things—faith that faith existed, faith that other people had faith in God—but he had at least as many doubts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in an intricate chart he created in
Reflections.
Here, he put his internal debate down on paper, weighing the pros and cons of being a devout Christian. To begin, he listed thirteen arguments in favor of choosing such a life and then, in a corresponding column to the right, an equal number against, each one effectively canceling the other out. For instance, number 8: he would have “general serenity of mind” as a Christian and, yet, “frequent mental conflicts.”

On first glance, I was amused by this elaborate entry, dated October 1851 and spilling over onto two full pages. The rambling title scrawled atop the chart made me smile: “In Deciding for a Christian Life in Future: A comparative statement of arguments For and Against, Advantages and Disadvantages, Encouragements and Discouragements, in a worldly point of view.”

“Worldly” it was not, to my eyes. On the contrary, the chart looked like the work of an endearingly naïve young man. It reminded me of a similar chart in Carter’s daily diary that served as a ledger of correspondence, letters received scrupulously balanced against each one sent out. But the more I studied this entry, the more heartbreaking it became. Along with his concern about whether he would ever be a good Christian was a second painful issue, though he intertwined the two: the repercussions of being a Dissenter. The term
Dissenter
applied to any non-Anglican denomination, but certain religions at the time were far more marginalized and despised than others, such as Evangelicalism, considered the most extreme, conservative branch of Christianity. Whatever his specific faith, Carter definitely saw himself as part of this minority, or, in other words, as a religious outsider. If publicly identified as such, he would suffer “jeers and ridicule,” “persecution—open and concealed,” “constant humiliation,” “no sympathy with many,” and on a personal level, “depression.”