The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy (23 page)

Her child from her first marriage.

After a narrow escape, she began to recover. As she had little money, we both wondered what she would do to get back to England. R. had almost ceased writing, probably having heard from some men of his Regiment who had passed through Bombay, visiting the Hotel, that some thing was going on between Mrs. B. and a Dr. Carter. How I became mixed up in the matter, was probably mistaken for the older man, but anyway, I began to allow self to shew some interest in her, and finding this every means was used to increase this by her, until I became more intimate than C. was.

Things came to a pass, he
[C.]
was not to be beguiled,…and I suffered myself to be so. I was then in a wretched state of mind—working hard at paper on Calculi in own room, but victim of sensuality and utter despondency. Visits were forced on me, every inducement and opportunity offered. She begged me to attend her for some fancied uterine complaint—and I yielded—even willingly. On 16th August crisis reached overpowering blandishments—and on 17th with the encouragement of a hasty kiss—she afterwards, dead of night, forced herself in my room—my God! What a night!

Perhaps Carter should have checked that all the curtains were drawn.

All this was witnessed by some railway engineers…who afterwards sent to me an anonymous account of all they had seen and heard, written in dogged lines, date and event.

Afterwards the course was reckless…. Though separate, we lived together. It became a matter of notoriety—drove out together in the buggy—everywhere. We then took fresh rooms in the Hotel, but
[the new owners,]
Parsees, found things getting too hot, and in October gave her a written notice to leave (I had previously become written security for her debts and paid them all).

…I found and furnished a small house nearby…. We lived there, not unhappily, hired carriage, bought horses, etc., etc. But conscience not asleep, often very miserable indeed. She was dissatisfied, and in December took the next step—the step even more reprehensible than before and known, so far as I am aware, to only a few individuals—made application to the Registrar (Hodge) and, swearing she was a widow, we were married at the Free Church on December 29, 1859 by James Aiken, a Scotch missionary. This was downright perjury.

Though she had inexplicably sworn she was a widow, her first husband was, in fact, very much alive. Was she now technically married to two men?

The marriage was not published in the papers. We had no visitors; the witnesses were two men hastily summoned, one a (coloured) general practitioner…and the other a Mr. Antone (Portuguese,) then secretary of the Bible and Trust Society…. I was in uniform.

Only now does he give her name.

She was called Harriet Bushell, (the name of her former husband).

Soon after I wrote to my Father and told him I was married, her name, and previous residence at the Cape, but nothing more. The circumstances which urged me to this step were my own feeling of the wrong state of things; her refusal to leave though offered a large income (£200 per annum) and constant suggestions; the risk of losing appointment and even more if things went on this way; and the hope that matters would then become straight. This,
[the other Dr.]
Carter, who called once or twice, assessed would be the case. But the act was possible only because of my weakness and at the time, utter blindness of the fault of false swearing.

Next, Carter examines his own conscience again.

I have a vivid recollection of driving to the Fort, joking with the Registrar, who suspecting no evil, made no opposition whatever. I believe an oath was taken and when her state had to be mentioned, the word “widow”—almost as far as I recollect improperly, though it must have been and really had been talked of between us—was written.

Long previous to this, a letter was sent to Capt. R. partly of
my
dictation, at her request, bidding
him
adieu…. Also, long before this, H. had I think had an abortion. But exactly at this time she seems to have conceived, as our baby was born almost within a few days, nine months hence—this striking concurrence was not without its effect, it seemed like Providence smiling on our sin….

On 14th September, 1860-the baby (girl) was born. Only a nurse and myself present. No congratulations. It was put in the papers—no one, except Campbell of the Asylum, made any enquiry to me.

In the winter, as money was getting short, for economy’s sake (and it turned out to be no economy) we went into a house in the Bellase’s Road which I furnished (£60). Sold the carriage and afterwards the shigram and horses. I had then to tramp about on foot to my work. And in January became almost sick—such a life of disquiet, indulgence, and folly.

In late spring 1861, Harriet and H. V. Carter (who was by now thirty years old) moved for the eighth time in two years, this time into a hotel owned by Mr. W. S. Sebright Green, “a solicitor, dabbling in speculation.” As rumors about Harriet could not be dismissed, Green eventually lodged a formal accusation against Carter for bringing her into his establishment.

At last, in July a fracas ensued. I was branded by Green as a blackguard and liar…. This left me terribly cut up…. Court of enquiry and the loss of my commission threatened.

A “court of enquiry” is a military court that looks into military matters, such as an officer’s questionable conduct. John Peet, mentioned in the next sentence, was the acting principal at Grant Medical College.

Peet then interested himself, and
[the other Dr.]
Carter, who saw the real state of things. An explanation and an apology followed. But I was compelled to sign a promise that H. and I should at once live separate. Delaying, a notice to quit from the George Hotel came, and I took a house at Chinchpoogly for her, myself occupying rooms at the Hope Hall Hotel. (I had been refused entrance at the Adelphi twice.) Soon a ship was found and, the brougham and a horse being sold, £145 was paid for passage for H., children and an ayah
[a nursemaid].
The captain of the Adripore—Hellyer by name—was briefly informed of the position of H. but I had to massage
[that is, to coax]
to get her to consent to go. Wearying sad scenes occurred, but they sailed September 20th 1861 for London.

So where has this left him?

I still occupy rooms at the Hope Hotel
—

A name that seems sadly ironic by now.

Sold the furniture and paid most of the debts. Now, have almost nothing in hand. Have written to Scarborough, only saying all had left, but giving no reason. It was understood she is to have £150 a year, no
[formal]
agreement made of any kind, but by not overfair means she has possession of the Marriage certificate. Talked largely of getting a divorce someway.

Carter writes only two more entries after this, one in January and the last in March 1862. He doesn’t run out of room; in fact, he leaves more than a hundred pages blank in the diary. He simply stops. In my experience, that is how it usually goes. A diary does not come to a neat, tidy ending. The diarist just doesn’t show up one day.

Fifteen

I
N A WORKING-CLASS NEIGHBORHOOD IN SOUTHWEST LONDON,
forty minutes by tube from the site of the original building, stands the current St. George’s Hospital. There is no grand façade. No columns, no marble, no tourists. The modernist architecture of today’s St. George’s is straight out of the 1970s, uninspired and un-memorable. On the other hand, just as in the days of Gray and Carter, the building doubles as a general hospital and a teaching hospital and, fortunately for my purposes, contains a small archive of historical material as part of its medical library. Even better, St. George’s has Nallini Thevakarrunai, the “library cataloger,” as she describes herself (archivist, I would call her), who has been the soul of patience in answering my many questions via e-mail about the hospital’s history.

Upon receiving her responses back home, I often thought,
What a beautiful name: Nuh-lee-nee Thu-vak-ar-roo-na;
it sounds like a musical phrase spelled phonetically. And upon meeting her in person in the St. George’s library, I find she exudes a similar quality, pleasant and serene. Nallini is originally from Sri Lanka and has worked for the hospital for almost thirty years, she tells Steve and me, which presents a mystery as she does not look a day over forty. She shows us a few historic items displayed in the library (including the hide of “Blossom,” the cowpox-infected cow that was the source for the first human smallpox vaccination in 1796), then leads us down a back stairwell to the archive, a small bunker of a room in the hospital basement.

Nallini mentions that she wants to let Dr. Gibson know we have arrived. Moments after she makes a call, a red-haired thunderbolt enters the room: Sandra Gibson, heir to the title once held by Henry Gray, curator of the Anatomy Museum, and a professor of biology at the medical school. After a quick volley of hellos, Dr. Gibson says, “Did Nallini tell you yet?!” Too excited to wait for an answer, she continues in her Irish lilt, “Nallini said you were coming today, so I did some looking, and I found
two specimens
that I can link to Henry Gray.” The museum has only a few specimens dating from the 1850s, she adds, but by digging into old records and checking against Gray’s actual postmortem reports, she had confirmed their authenticity.

It’s fair to say, I am pretty shocked, knowing that the original St. George’s Anatomy Museum had been destroyed during the Blitz. I didn’t think any specimens had survived.

Eager to share her discovery, Sandra leads us across the hallway to “the museum,” although, as she is quick to concede,
museum
is too fancy a word for the place. It is a large room filled with sturdy shelves holding hundreds of containers—bottles and vitrines—containing anatomical specimens. This is a teaching collection, Sandra explains, a resource for the med school staff, brought into classrooms when visuals are needed. We come to a stop at a low shelf in the back corner. She removes a bottle the size of a Mason jar and hands it to me. “How’s your anatomy?” she asks in a friendly way.

“Pretty good,” I reply, although I honestly have no idea what’s inside the bottle; it looks like a dog’s chew toy, microwaved.

“This is the heart of a twenty-five-year-old woman,” Sandra says. “You can see the aorta here”—she points to an eye-shaped opening—“but what’s unusual is, she had four rather than three aortic valve cusps.”

Pickled in preservatives, the heart has shrunken over time, but I can clearly see the abnormality she described.

“Would that be what killed her?” Steve asks.

“No, in fact, Gray says in his postmortem that this had never caused her any problems or even been detected. She died of typhoid or tuberculosis or something. But it was an unusual condition, which is why he preserved it.” Steve hands the heart back to Sandra, and she returns it to the shelf.

She next shows us a preserved portion of spine with two completely separated cervical vertebrae—that is, a broken neck. This is another Gray original but, unlike the heart, is still in its original container. Rather than suspended in liquid, it rests on a bed of cotton in a thick-walled glass vitrine sealed at the top with bitumen, which looks like dried black tar.

This is the closest I have ever gotten to Henry Gray himself, it strikes me as I hold the container. You could probably dust the inside of the lid for his fingerprints or open it up and hunt for one of his hairs, maybe an eyelash, and test it for his DNA. But, really, finding proof through fragments of Gray’s anatomy is not necessary. As Sandra explains, both specimens can be matched to postmortem reports written in Gray’s hand.

She heads out the door, and we follow her
follow me
s. Back in the archive, Nallini rejoins us, and the four of us stand before a wall lined with large leather-bound books. The topmost shelf holds what looks like a set of encyclopedias for giant children but is in fact a series of nineteenth-century postmortem reports, bound and arranged by year. Sandra had previously pulled the hefty 1858 volume, which now rests on a library cart. Nallini moves it to a nearby table, Sandra turns to a report about twenty pages in, then each takes a small step back. The two women—one pale and freckled, the other olive-skinned—wear matching expressions:
Well, go ahead, take a look.

The first thing we notice is his signature,
Henry Gray,
underlined twice at the bottom of the page. I instantly compare it in my mind to H. V. Carter’s, whose signature is both less legible and fussier-looking; Gray’s penmanship, by contrast, is easy to read. The patient had been “under the care of Dr. Page” (a familiar name from Carter’s diary), and in describing the condition of her heart, Gray had written, “The aortic valve was composed of four flaps.” In the margin, he had noted in a smaller hand, “Specimen showing the Aortic valve is preserved in the Museum.”

Sandra allows us a moment to marvel, then tells us to flip to case number 199. Here we find a report for one “William Parry,” who, as Gray reported, had “fallen, head first, a height of about 14 feet—”

“Ouch,” I think aloud, “that would’ve hurt.”

“Not for long, though,” Steve adds. As Gray noted, Mr. Parry “had lost all power of motion or sensation in all the extremities and in the trunk of the body.” He was paralyzed and died two days after being admitted to the hospital.

Sandra has to dash off to teach a class, but Nallini invites us to pull whatever volumes we want from the wall. There are hundreds of reports by Henry Gray within these books, she tells us, and points out the two worktables on the opposite side of the room.

My first impulse is one I almost feel I should suppress: to see the postmortem report on Henry Gray himself. Without knowing why exactly, this seems ghoulish; it’s one thing to read reports on total strangers, but on someone you’ve come to know? In any event, I am spared any further moral ambivalence. Steve is already up the step stool retrieving the 1861 volume. We find no report for Henry Gray, which, upon reflection, makes sense. Merely by looking at the thirty-four-year-old man’s ravaged body, his death by smallpox would have been unmistakable, and, given the risk of contagion, an autopsy probably would not have been allowed.

Suddenly, the horror of what Gray went through hits me. He must have known, from the moment he saw a patch of pustules on his body becoming confluent—meaning, running together, a continuous blistering—he would not survive. Once the pustules spread into his mouth and throat, slowly suffocating him, the end would be terrifying. Whereas his death had once seemed incredibly fast to me, coming just a week after falling ill, now it did not seem fast enough.

WE KNOW THAT
he was buried in a private grave, dug to an extra-deep depth of eight feet (not due to smallpox, interestingly, but to allow for additional interments on top); that the exact time of burial was half past one o’clock on Saturday, June 15, 1861; and that the total burial cost was £7.3s. Keith Nicol has all the documentation from the London Cemetery Company. We also know that a woman named Ellen Connor—a private nurse, in all likelihood—was present at the time of death. This fact is listed on Henry Gray’s death certificate, a copy of which was easy enough for Keith to track down at the General Register Office. We know, too, that Gray had apparently contracted smallpox from the nephew he had been treating. Still, Steve, Keith, and I find ourselves puzzled by the most basic question about Gray’s death. As the death certificate clearly states, he had been “vaccinated in childhood” against smallpox, so why did he become ill?

“I think the reason Henry fell prey to it,” Keith suggests, “is that he’d been nursing Charles for so long and he was literally exhausted.” Gray’s work ethic may have also played a role. “Because he was such a hard worker as well, perhaps his general strength wasn’t a hundred percent.” Plus, “We just don’t know how good or effective the smallpox vaccine was back then.” Perhaps he should have been vaccinated again, as an adult?

Another possibility, I offer, is that the strain was especially virulent. “But if so, how did his little nephew survive?”

“Maybe he didn’t get it from the nephew,” Steve counters.

Keith shrugs and smiles a sympathetic smile that says,
I know, I know. I’ve been dealing with questions like this for fifteen years.

As we speak, we are surrounded by the product of Keith’s labors: dozens of binders containing the research he had gathered for his Henry Gray chronology. Some are still lined up on bookshelves here in his home office, but most lie in piles around us. Our visit to Keith’s South London home was meant to be purely social, a chance to get acquainted over a cup of tea. But other than learning that he is an uncommonly gracious man, that he has two grown daughters, and that he is tall, bearded, and “of 1956 vintage,” I do not know a lot more about Keith personally than I did before we arrived. Instead, we have spent the last three hours going through the binders and hashing out the two Henrys. This no doubt reveals a lot about the two of us. Keith was first drawn to the history of Gray, and I, to the mystery. Our research paths have taken us in different directions, mine straight to Carter, his circling lesser known figures at St. George’s. But in the end, it is the story of Gray that brings us together. Here we are, in the dying light of a humid October afternoon, trying to re-create the anatomist’s final days.

I tell Keith that Steve and I had spent the morning at St. George’s and mention the likelihood that an autopsy had not been performed—

It wasn’t just Henry Gray that was potentially infectious, Keith points out. “With smallpox, the blisters would have a very watery discharge inside them, and the skin would be stretched to such an extent that the slightest touch would break it. It would then burst as an aerosol into the air. Eventually, once the smallpox was confluent, he was horrible. So was the room that Gray was in; it was full of these fomites, which was the aerosol infection. So the bedding, the wallpaper, the curtains, everything that was in the room, was potentially infectious. Imagine that this was Henry’s bedroom, the room we’re sitting in—”

Steve and I look around the packed, closed room.

“The Victorians had one solution for that level of contamination: fire.”

“
Fire,
” I repeat to myself. The word crackles.

“In Victorian London, there was an official called the inspector of nuisances—”

“
Nuisance
must have had a different meaning then,” Steve interjects.

“Oh yes, it wasn’t the guy that pesters you, saying ‘Do you want to buy any naughty postcards?’” He laughs. “No,
nuisances
as in epidemics, infectious epidemics. Smallpox, chicken pox, all that sort of thing. This group was responsible for disinfecting or cleaning out the infection from a house or an area. They would probably have gone in and just said, ‘Right, strip this room down to the bare plaster and just burn everything.’”

Keith hesitates for a moment. “This is just a theory, but I reckon that’s what carried away the evidence that you and I so desperately want—”

“His papers.” I can see them going into the flames. “His letters, diaries—”

“Possibly, yeah,” Keith says, hedging a bit. “I don’t know for sure.”

“No, I’m sure you’re right,” I respond. “That’s what happened to his new book, the one on tumors—”

“And his revisions for the next edition of
Gray’s,
” says Steve, tossing more fuel on the fire, “his original manuscript.”

His clothes, the rugs, his Bible—we heap everything on the pile.

“Yes,” Keith nods. “A bonfire of everything he had touched.”