The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy (24 page)

Sixteen

T
HE WELLCOME LIBRARY DOESN’T HAVE A SINGLE MS. WHEAT. NO,
it has
four
Ms. Wheats, one of whom is a silver-haired man. The staff person presiding over the Special Collections Room has changed throughout the day: the petite brown-haired young woman who greeted us at 9:30 and gave us the first folder of letters from the Carter archive morphed into a middle-aged man, who, next time I glanced over, had turned into a fortyish matronly type—a cousin to Valerie Wheat—and then, wordlessly, back into another young woman, this one with ruddy skin and a nose piercing. But—who knows?—maybe there was yet another librarian sitting there in between those last two. Since arriving, Steve and I have hardly looked up from the piles of letters.

Every page of every letter—every scrap of paper in the Carter Papers, including actual scraps of paper—bears a tiny penciled number identifying its proper place in each of eighteen separate folders. Despite the impeccable organization, however, there’s no math that makes it easy to calculate how long it will take to get through a single folder. It depends as much on the number of pieces as on their readability, length, and relevance. There are more than three hundred items in the Carter archive, and over the next few days, we have many loose ends to tie off. Our unexpected discovery at the British Library, for instance—that Carter had not, in fact, put
Gray’s Anatomy
behind him in coming to India—has made me rethink another assumption: that he’d put his old friend Henry Gray behind him as well. Now I have a new thought. Gray
must
come up in Carter’s correspondence, but where and when?

Near the bottom of a box of letters to Lily is the answer: The eighty-eighth of 116 letters, dated October 10, 1861, to be precise: “You will know (‘young’) Mr. Gray is dead,” he tells his sister, adding on a sorrowful note, just as he was “on the threshold of a high career.” As his phrasing indicates, he is not breaking the news to Lily; she would have heard or read about it long before word reached him in Bombay. Rather, H.V. is tacitly sharing his grief, which I find all the more moving. Lily had visited her brother in London twice during his years there and perhaps had met “Mr. Gray” in person. Better than anyone, she would know how keenly he felt the loss of this extraordinary man.

As an object, the letter itself captures the delicate emotions conveyed. The opaque onionskin stationery is as thin as tissue paper, and the ink, once brown perhaps, has faded to a gold so faint as to be nearly invisible.
Read it quick and write it down fast,
I tell myself,
before it disappears.

Gray’s passing is not the only sad news he shares. He tells Lily that Mr. Queckett at the College of Surgeons has also died. Carter then carefully, very carefully, drops a bombshell. “Misfortunes,” he writes, “have at length broken up my little household. She who was my wife has left India, in a sailing vessel, for England, and I am now quite alone.”

He doesn’t give Harriet’s name, as if it were too distasteful to include in so gentle a letter. As portrayed by Carter, she is continually the villain in the tale—a liar, a loose woman, a corrupter—someone I had pictured as being irresistibly sensual and impossible to please. Which is why “hearing” her voice elsewhere in the Carter Papers, starting with two letters from Harriet to H.V., comes as a surprise. On paper, she seems
lady-like
and
agreeable,
the very words Carter had used when he first met Harriet back in Khandalla.

“My dear Henry,” she writes in a short note sent the day before setting sail for London:

I am much obliged to you for giving me the Certificate of our Marriage, and I promise never to show it to any one, or to name such a document as being in my possession unless I am actually obliged to do so for self protection.

Yours,
Love,
H. Carter, Late: Bushell

Harriet writes again two days later, September 21, 1861. Now on board the boat with her two children, she bares her soul. “I have given you much pain and trouble, forgive me, I pray you…. I am sincerely sorry that I have managed so badly.”

Later in this letter, she unwittingly reveals an unexpected side to H.V. and to their relationship. “Your last words that you would ‘be with me in spirit’ are indeed a consolation. Never for a moment have [
sic
] any thing taken my thoughts from you, my preserver.” Harriet then speaks of what a comfort their daughter is to her. “I can feel that you are actually present with me in her.”

So what was the real story here? Someone wasn’t being entirely honest, whether H.V. or Harriet Carter, or perhaps both. How to uncover the truth?

Steve and I start where all the trouble began, with one word:
widow.
Sure enough, there it is on the couple’s marriage certificate, which we found tucked in a small file of Carter’s miscellaneous papers. Why had Harriet lied? What had been going through her mind?

Her lawyer, in a letter from May 1862, offers an explanation: Harriet had had “doubts” as to whether her divorce had been finalized, so, in order to “avoid debate,” she had sworn widowhood instead—simple as that. But why remarry if you are the least bit unsure you’re actually divorced? Something fishy was going on, and Steve and I followed the trail back to the tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, five thousand miles from Bombay. Here is where Harriet’s first husband divorced her on grounds of adultery, it turns out, presumably with the aforementioned Captain Robinson. Now, whether she had actually been unfaithful is unknown. But
shame,
not doubt, must have led her to lie on the marriage certificate. Far better to be known at the time as a widow than as an adulterous divorcée.

Just as this was beginning to sound like musty Victorian melodrama, out of the blue came a voice of reason: “I have already informed you that the first marriage was completely annulled and that the second marriage was valid—”

Actually, this was Steve, whispering into my ear as I typed on the laptop.

He had dug up a letter from Carter’s lawyer, Richard Spooner of Kent, England, who clarified, once and for all, the legal matters in the case of
Carter v. Carter.
His verdict? H.V. had no case against Harriet. At Carter’s request, Spooner had also asked Harriet personally if she would agree to a divorce.

Without any hesitation she said that she never was really attached to any person except you—that she loved you dearly—would do whatever you wished and never spend a Rupee without your permission—and that she would prefer living with you although she might be coldly received or received not at all by the Bombay community.

Spooner then adds his own two cents:

I would venture to suggest to your consideration whether it would not be advisable to treat her kindly and let her live with you again. After a few years all former occurrences will be gradually buried in oblivion.

DAY TWO AT
the library dawns. Steve and I are joined by fellow hunters and gatherers at the large center table in the Poynter Reading Room. Although we exchange little more than nods of hello, I feel we could not be in more genial, civilized company. Directly across from us sits a middle-aged woman, both chic and bookish, who was also here all day yesterday. A Mona Lisa smile never left her face as she endlessly inputted from a stack of small medieval-looking tomes. Steve and I have decided—based on no facts whatsoever—that she is a historical romance novelist tracking down period details and atmosphere. The young married couple is back as well. They seem as passionate about each other as they do about tracing their genealogy. As for Steve and me, we still have our own little family history to sort out: Did H. V. Carter follow his lawyer’s advice (and Harriet’s wishes) and take his wife back? Or did he divorce her? And what happened to his daughter? In the second-to-last entry of his diary, he writes with great anguish about the child, “that poor infant, a sweet healthy babe.”

Can I ever expect—hope—to see her again? Years ago, poor old grandfather Barlow, when he used to set me part of the way home from Dry-pool, would peer anxiously those dark Saturday nights under every passing woman’s bonnet—a scrutinizing gaze so peculiar and keen that, unobservant youth as I was, it almost appalled me. He expected—hoped?—to see the face of his own daughter—a creature of the town, notoriously public
—

Illegitimate.

Am I ever to endure
his
…bitterness? But this is far anticipation—God knows alone our future rescue or doom. Every passing child wrings my heart.

Among Carter’s papers, I come upon a small note that must have just about broken it. Dated 1867, it is written in a child’s scrawl: “Dear Papa come soon.”

His daughter would have been six years old at the time.

Did his heart begin to soften, finally? Did he ever find a way to forgive Harriet? The answer would be unknowable, it’s safe to say, were it not for one person—

“My Dear Sister—”

Yes, Lily, confidante to all, quiet keeper of all things. This batch of letters was not from H.V., however, but her sister-in-law, Harriet. Apparently, the two women had become close after Harriet returned on her own to England.

“I wished to tell you that Henry is now the Principal of a hospital in Bombay,” Harriet writes to Lily in December 1879. You can hear the pride in her voice.

Unfortunately, Lily’s side of the conversation is silent. Though 80 percent of the material in the Carter Papers comes from her, not a single letter in her own hand survives. Still, it is clear that Lily and Harriet were on very good terms.

“Henry is so much engrossed in his book that we see little of him,” Harriet confides in a letter from January 1881. “I for my part shall be very thankful when the said book is in the press.”

Only three of these sister-to-sister letters survive, none earlier than 1879, but in this small cluster comes a remarkable number of answers. First and foremost, Harriet and H.V. were never divorced, but they also never lived together again. Instead, the couple maintained an unconventional relationship that endured for more than twenty years. Other than a series of furloughs, H.V. remained in India, while Harriet and the children lived in Europe, including England, Germany, and Italy. Mother, father, and daughter apparently did reunite on occasion, spending a month together in Rome, for instance. And at least once in India, husband and wife spent time alone together, though in a town a good distance from Bombay and its late-Victorian mores. Was this a romantic rendezvous? As it should be, perhaps, the level of intimacy between the two is never defined.

Harriet, it turns out, was not the only bearer of news about H. V. Carter and family. Lily also received delightfully chatty letters from her niece, Harriet and H.V.’s daughter, Eliza Harriet “Lily” Carter. In one of the four surviving letters, we hear for the first time about her half brother, Harriet’s heretofore unnamed son, John, who was a couple of years older. Around age twenty, John ran off to Australia, perhaps seeking his fortune in the gold trade. “Let us hope that no news is good news, and that he is doing well in Australia, for we think he is still there,” Eliza tells her aunt. “We often hear of boys who behaved in a similar way and yet came to no harm.” John’s ultimate fate is unknown.

A charming instance of her father’s acting fatherly comes in a letter dated October 3, 1878. Writing from Switzerland, Eliza and her mother are en route to Florence, where she would spend the winter studying Italian and taking painting and voice lessons, she tells her “Auntie” Lily, “to try and satisfy dear Papa’s wishes in occupying my time in ‘the pursuit of knowledge.’” Her groaning lifts right off the page. From the sound of it, H.V., in spite of his absence, was trying to instill in Eliza his own love of learning, and she was reacting with all the enthusiasm of a typical teenager.

By this point, Carter’s work for the Indian Medical Service had taken him out of the classroom entirely, and in his midforties, he had found his true calling in life: independent medical research. This seems such a natural fit for Carter, but only in hindsight. When he had received his first copy of the
Anatomy,
he confided to his diary that he could never take on such a huge project again, unless working under a “ruling mind” such as Henry Gray—a natural leader, someone able to see the big picture, to use a modern phrase. Of himself, Carter wrote, “[I] analyze life on too small a scale.” What he meant as a putdown, however, I see as his great gift. Carter’s ability to focus on the small, to break things down, to mentally dissect—the same ability that made him so miserable on personal inspection—is what made him such a precise anatomical artist and such a natural researcher. This man who so firmly believed “I can’t” is now recognized by medical historians as a pioneer, the first scientist to apply modern methods of scientific research to the investigation of tropical diseases.

CARTER’S FIRST SIGNIFICANT
finding as a researcher dates back to 1860, when he was still teaching at Grant Medical College. His clinical observation of a condition known at the time as “Madura foot” had deeply troubled him. The disease seemed to afflict only poor Indian laborers, who, for reasons unknown, developed enormously painful and disabling masses in their feet and/or hands. No treatment was effective, short of amputation. Puzzled, Carter began examining surgical specimens with the microscope he had brought with him from London, and he became convinced that the culprit was a fungus of some kind. Since the laborers worked in their bare feet or with bare hands, the organism, Carter theorized, must be entering through cuts in the skin. Though unable to prove this by growing cultures of the fungus, he published his research, and two decades later, his theory was confirmed. Madura foot eventually came to be known by a new name, “Carter’s mycetoma.”

After five years at the college, Carter was relocated one hundred miles south of Bombay to the district of Satara and was appointed the “civil surgeon” (chief medical officer) and superintendent to the “gaol” (jail). He spent nine years here. Not one letter written by Carter survives from this entire period, giving the spooky impression that he had been locked away himself, but the reality is, he kept himself as busy as possible. On top of his other duties, for instance, he volunteered for what sounds like a daunting task: analyzing data that had been collected on eighty-two hundred Indian lepers but was simply gathering dust in government files. The result of his work, published in an 1871 Bombay medical journal, helped to dispel a number of misconceptions about the dread disease, whose true cause (a mycobacterium) was still unknown. No, he concluded, external factors such as local geography and topography were not relevant to etiology, and even though the afflicted were almost always the poorest of the poor, neither was poverty. As historian Shubhada Pandya recently noted, “Carter took pains to point out that want and deprivation were
consequences
rather than
precedents
of leprosy.” Carter also soundly refuted the imperialist notion that poor hygiene among the “natives” was to blame. On the contrary, he noted without condescension, the Indian people bathed once a day—
just like you and me,
he seemed to imply—and “personal cleanliness is not neglected.”