The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy (17 page)

Eleven

“[H
AD A] LONG CHAT WITH GRAY, WHO CANNOT UNDERSTAND
that anyone should really wish to work and yet not be able to begin,” Carter confides to his diary on January 8, 1856. “He is altogether practical—‘
Do it
!’—his aim ‘money,’ chiefly. As for self, need energy and
right
counsel. Mind certainly not healthy or balanced, and time very indifferently spent.”

This sounds less like a chat and more like a spat. Every time I read this entry, I feel as if I am right there as these two enact a fascinating early scene in the genesis of
Gray’s Anatomy
. Each Henry plays his role to a T: Gray, the taskmaster, is all business, while Carter is the temperamental artiste who seems to have misplaced his muse. Oh, he sounds so grieved, so misunderstood! But he also sounds troubled.
The line Mind certainly not healthy or balanced
always stops me cold. Though I can make no claims to a definitive diagnosis, this young man seems gripped not just by artist’s block but by a debilitating depression as well.

That H. V. Carter was prone to dark moods had been clear from the start of his diary. To some extent, I had taken this tendency with a grain of salt, as I know that sometimes, on the pages of one’s diary, feelings get overblown, the better to puncture and purge them. Also, I had noticed a predictable pattern to Carter’s moodiness. He suffered from a condition I had myself as a young man, what I call the Sunday syndrome. His entries tended to be at their longest, most heartfelt, and most angst-ridden on Sundays, the day when he set aside worldly matters and took time to reflect and attend church. The sermons delivered by the ever-stalwart Reverend Martin were rarely less than “capital” or “excellent” and always left Carter with a boost of fresh resolve to be a good, moral, industrious person. But this was the spiritual equivalent of a sugar high. By the end of the day—diary-writing time—he would crash and burn, convinced that he fell far short of the ideal Christian he knew he should be. Such was his misery that I’ve often thought he would have been a happier person if the week had only six days.

As the darkness slipped into his diary more and more often, I could no longer write it off to Sunday. With the start of 1856, Carter’s moodiness becomes the blackest melancholy, and the twenty-five-year-old writes of being fitful, fatigued, and overtaken by lethargy, classic physical symptoms of depression. Carter knows he is not well but is at a loss for what to do. “Am right down [
sic
] helpless when ought to help self. No abiding effort. Must be
compelled
, not invited.”

Remarkably, he pushes through this latest episode, but it takes him a full four weeks. Finally he reports, “Made first drawings for the work.”

Now just 360 more to go.

Gray’s workload was no less daunting. He would have to write nothing short of an encyclopedia on anatomy in less than a year and a half. Under the circumstances, I would almost expect more quarrels and creative differences to have surfaced between the two men. But such did not seem to be the case. From the outset, author and artist shared a strong vision of the book they wanted to create. As historian Ruth Richardson observes in her introduction to the thirty-ninth British edition of
Gray’s Anatomy,
“Neither was interested in producing a pretty book, or an expensive one. Their purpose was to supply an affordable, accurate teaching aid for students like their own.”

As both men dealt with students on a daily basis and had recently been students themselves, they knew that small innovations would make a big impact. Unlike Quain’s
Elements of Anatomy,
which came in a three-volume set, for instance, this book would contain in a single volume everything a student needed to know about the human body. Further, bucking the trend of pocket-sized texts, some as small as 4 by 6 inches (10 by 17 centimeters), Gray, Carter, and their publisher, John Parker & Son, also planned a larger than usual book, with a no-squinting-necessary text size and illustrations that could breathe. Even at this size, 6 by 9½ inches (15 by 24 centimeters), it would still be light and easily totable. Parker & Son would also be happy, as this was a cost-effective size to print. The bottom line was, the book was shrewdly designed from the get-go to
sell.

I cannot help bringing up a small irony here. The very phrase that H. V. Carter had used as an epithet to describe Gray also serves as a perfect characterization for the book the two had in mind: it would be
altogether practical.
What’s more, practicality would be a guiding principle throughout the project’s eighteen-month duration. Between author and artist, there would be no wasted effort. Performing dissections together, for instance, would save time on many fronts, including helping them come to a speedy agreement on the fine points of each illustration—what stage of a dissection should be drawn, what perspective to use, and so on. As seasoned anatomists, too, they certainly knew how to make the most of their most precious resource, cadavers. Between dissections done for classes and those for the book, no material would go to waste. I expect the same could be said when it came to the manuscript. Gray undoubtedly drew upon his three-year back catalog of lecture notes as a basis for his text and, alternatively, used any freshly written text as a basis for new lectures. This, I believe, helps explain the distinctive tone of Gray’s prose. You can open the book to almost any paragraph and find the clear, unrushed voice of an experienced instructor speaking directly to a rapt classroom.

Carter was able to do double duty as well, using dissections he had performed as demonstrator or for the Anatomy Museum as subjects to be drawn for the book. At first, he drew on paper, but about six months into the project, he made a radical change. He began drawing directly onto the wood blocks that would ultimately be used for the book’s engravings. Whether at the publisher’s behest or, as I suspect, on his own initiative, this would end up saving a huge amount of time by bypassing the need to have someone else transfer the drawings from paper to wood. Still, it was akin to switching to a whole new medium, and Carter found the transition bumpy. “Pretty assiduous at Kinnerton Street,” he notes after one of many long days spent in the lab. “Drawing from nature and on wood. Result of latter, so-so. Require practice, improving.” Strikingly, he does not sound frustrated or discouraged, which is right in character, since Carter was always happiest when engaged in learning something new. And one need look no farther than the finished book to see how perfectly he mastered the technique.

I should mention one last major time-saving device Carter employed, one that, upon first learning of it, came as a surprise to me: he copied some of the illustrations from other anatomy books. This fact, omitted from the later American editions of
Gray’s Anatomy,
was acknowledged right up front in the original English edition at the beginning of a seven-page list of illustrations (also left out of later editions, if only to save space). The number of copied illustrations was small, 77 of the 363 total, and it is easy to understand Gray and Carter’s rationale: If another artist has perfectly captured a dissection, why not use what’s ready-made? You would save not just time but a cadaver, which, in the spirit of the endeavor, seems eminently practical. But what merited borrowing?

As it turns out, Carter pulled not from one or two but from nineteen different sources, including his beloved Quain’s. This discovery invokes the wonderful image of the two men raiding the St. George’s Lending Library and of Henry Gray’s home office being carpeted with dozens of anatomy books laid open to possible candidates.

I TAKE A
seat as Ms. Wheat studies my list of the nineteen artist-anatomists. It literally goes from A to Z—
Arnold,
first name
Friedrich,
to
Zinn,
first name
Johann
—and comprises a who’s who of leading figures of the nineteenth century, not only English anatomists but German, Italian, French, Scottish, and Dutch as well. Most of these luminaries have since faded into obscurity, however, and copies of their works are now exceedingly rare. Which is the reason for my visit.

Ms. Wheat hands back the list and asks just one question: Where would I like to begin?

“With Arnold,” I reply without hesitation, and not simply because he is alphabetically first on the list. A third of Carter’s copied illustrations come from this single source. Friedrich Arnold (1803-90) was a longtime professor of anatomy at the University of Heidelberg, and he specialized in the microanatomy of the nervous system. He was the author of some sixteen books, most of which he also illustrated, one of which is now being delivered to me personally.

Ms. Wheat places a foam lectern in front of me, followed by
Icones Nervorum Capitis
(1834), Arnold’s first illustrated work, a monograph on the cranial nerves. It takes just a preliminary fanning of the pages to understand why Carter would wish to copy from it. Arnold’s artwork is seriously beautiful, as is the book as a whole. The pages are oversized and the lithography of the highest quality.

I linger over one of Arnold’s full-page drawings, a profile of a human head split down the middle—a hemihead. Though the line work is astonishingly precise in spots, the overall effect is sumptuous, almost painterly. Arnold’s style is unlike any I have ever seen, perhaps even deserving its own category. Call it Anatomical Romanticism.

With just a turn of the page, though, I begin to see a flaw in his approach to illustrating, one that Gray and Carter no doubt noticed as well. Friedrich Arnold produced illustrations in pairs, the first being a fine-art rendering; the second, a simple bold outline, as if for an anatomy coloring book. Only on this second page are the names of parts listed, so you have to flip back and forth between the two prints to get the full effect. While this would be only a minor nuisance for a student—as when footnotes, for example, are at the back of a book rather than at the bottom of the page—it was still a format that Gray and Carter would not wish to duplicate. When drawing from Arnold, therefore, Carter had to perform an act of imaginative super-imposition.

I pull out my copy of
Gray’s
and look for a good example of this melding and find one in Carter’s illustration of the fifth cranial nerve, taken from Arnold’s paired illustration of the same subject. Here, the artistic and the diagrammatic combine seamlessly, with Carter’s added innovation of the anatomical names appearing on the parts themselves. Seeing the versions side by side also helps clear up a bit of confusion I had been carrying with me. In his characteristically meticulous way, Carter identified three degrees of borrowing in the list of illustrations, noting that drawings were either directly copied from another source, “Altered from,” or “After,” distinctions that sounded to me like shades of gray on the same cloud. But I finally understand what he meant. Carter categorized this particular piece, for instance, as “After Arnold,” which sounds right. It is not a line-for-line copy, nor is it altered from the original to, say, highlight a different anatomical feature or aspect of a dissection. No, instead, it is a tribute to a great German artist-anatomist. It is an homage.

Ms. Wheat, in her mysterious librarian stealth mode, has quietly come and gone, leaving behind a neat stack of three: Quain’s
Anatomy.
The work of English anatomist Jones Quain (1796—1865), this was Carter’s second highest source for borrowed images. I approach it with trepidation—no, make that fear. To my dismay, I had discovered that one of my favorite H. V. Carter drawings, the glorious full-page engraving of the muscles of the back (reproduced in chapter 6), was not an original but copied from Quain. Was his version little more than a Victorian Xerox, or did he bring something of his own style to the reproduction? Did he make it
his
?

I find the answer in volume 3.

Except for being about 50 percent smaller, the engraving at first glance looks almost identical to Carter’s. But something is different, too, something it takes me a moment to appreciate. Simply put, Carter’s drawing, by comparison, seems to lift off the page. He employed every tool at his command to create three-dimensionality, from a greater variation in line width to an off-center light source. Rather than each layer of the dissection’s looking uniform, as in Quain’s, Carter “lit” his version to create a subtle play of shadows across the subject’s back. Also, Carter had taken Quain’s original squat figure and stretched it, making the torso taller and slimmer, thereby accentuating the illusion of depth. In spite of these adjustments, he indicated that this drawing was “directly copied from” Quain, but in the copying, the twenty-five-year-old still brought his own aesthetic to the piece.

Comparing other Quain drawings to Carter’s, I find the same pattern again and again. It’s as though Jones Quain created a first draft of each, which H. V. Carter then polished and perfected.

I tell Ms. Wheat that her seemingly magical ability to retreat through the rear door of the Rare Books Room and return with the most esoteric of tomes makes me wonder if she could produce the impossible: the greatest anatomy book
never
published. What I’m referring to is a legendary nonbook by none other than Leonardo da Vinci (1452—1519). As the story—a true one—goes, Leonardo first began giving serious thought to producing a book on human anatomy while in his midthirties. He thought he would call it
On the Human Figure.
Along with the title, Leonardo jotted down a rough outline and did some early sketches. Frankly, though, this was a pretty big idea for someone whose knowledge of human anatomy was quite small. At this point in his life, Leonardo’s anatomical education had come chiefly from reading outdated texts, such as the works of Galen, Mondino, and Avicenna, and from the observation of surface anatomy in living models. His exposure to human dissection was limited to being a spectator to the occasional postmortems open to the public. This changed once Leonardo moved from Milan to Florence in the early 1500s. He was now able to obtain the random arm or leg of unclaimed corpses from a Florence hospital and, working by candlelight in the hospital basement, surreptitiously began teaching himself internal anatomy. As his understanding grew, his conception of the anatomy book changed as well, moving from being artistic in tone to something far more scientific. A
Treatise on Anatomy,
he retitled it. Still, the book remained a perpetual work in progress, set aside again and again while he and his restless mind pursued other projects, most of which he also never finished.