“I don’t know what my health will matter when I’ve gone bankrupt,” says Mr. Brunton simply.
So Dr. Daun and those who believe with him that the disease is contagious stand helplessly by while every business owner in Sunderland votes away the cholera morbus. Sadly, the chairman counts the number of raised doctors’ hands among them: all but five of the twenty in attendance. What, after all, did he expect? The physicians don’t receive their fees from the poor.
The meeting moves on, but Henry Chiver leaves in disgust.
The constables have dispersed the crowd outside, and Death has been deposed from the door of the Corn Exchange. He shakes his spear at potato peels in the gutter now, and bares his teeth at the worn soles of Henry’s shoes when the doctor absently trods upon his neck. A cold wind from the east is driving a bank of clouds into town, and the weather vane atop Sunderland Orphanage, a tall, three-masted ship, points forlornly out to sea.
Henry’s thoughts run as stormily as the weather. He will never escape the stain of murder, not so long as he continues in this profession. None of his opinions will matter, his name will be forever blasted, and all because of Burke and Hare. It is time he faces up to it: he died a sort of death back in Edinburgh, and while it is possible to dress up a corpse and ship it to a new town, eventually men will comment on the smell.
His heart is heavy on the walk back to Nile Street. He watches the ragpickers and street sweepers going about their business, some of the only men in full employ, set to work by the Board of Health to keep Sunderland as refuse-free as possible. Enjoy your charge while you may, Henry thinks you have no idea how you are about to be served up by the city’s elite. He walks past a Board of Health sign, readable again since the constables ripped down most of the resistance posters.
PERSONS
SUFFERING
UNDER
A
TERROR
OF
CHOLERA
MORBUS
SHOULD
NOT
ATTEND
THE
DYING
. That flyer
TOO
WILL
SOON
COME
down, for with no cholera, who should be afraid? In this funk, Henry absently passes the Black Bull pub, where, out of the corner of his eye, he notices a young man sprawled upon the stoop. At any other time, Henry would assume the lad had crawled too far into his cups and merely passed out, but after the meeting, he feels he owes it to the man to investigate. The rising miasma of stale beer when Henry turns him over seems to support his initial conclusion, but he kneels and feels for his pulse, just to make sure.
In medical school, Henry was taught two models for disease: one, predicated upon contagion, which identifies the harmful agent as an enemy attacking the self; and a second, in keeping with the native soil theory, which suggests that disease dwells within each of us, merely waiting an opportunity to erupt. Plague obviously fit the first category, cancers the second. Where on the spectrum does this new disease fall? Henry wonders, peering under the eyelids of this pitiful sot before him. If this man led a virtuous life, attended church, ate and drank moderately, and loved his neighbor, would he be spared? Or is it his very fabric that condemns him? Henry is debating whether or not to send for the Infirmary sedan when two old women approach the bar. He puts out his hand to stop them. “Do you know this man?” he asks.
“Is he dead?” The first woman leans over and scrutinizes him. “Wake up!” she shouts. “Someone’s going to come along and burke you.”
“Madame, there is no need to terrify the poor man,” Henry bristles. “That was a long time ago.”
“A long time ago?” cries the old woman. “I beg your pardon, sir, but my niece just came up from London, and the whole town’s abuzz with it.”
“With what?” asks Henry.
“A poor little Italian boy who showed mice for a living. Four men burked him and sold him to St. Guy’s Hospital.”
“And that’s not the only one,” adds her friend. “A mother held her hand over the mouth of an old woman for half an hour, then with her husband took the old dame to the anatomy school on Windmill Street. Two taken into custody in one week.”
“You can’t be too careful when ye’re one of us, sir.” The first old lady shakes the snoozing drunk, who grunts and rolls over. “Between the cholera and the burking, we can barely keep body and soul together.”
Henry leaves the two women hauling their friend inside to sanctuary. His history has estranged him from the lower and upper classes alike. If he is not to spend the remainder of his life a pariah, Henry thinks despondently, something must be done.
A light is burning in his second-story window, but Henry knows he would never be so careless as to leave a lamp lit when going out. He pauses with his hand on the door, his first nervous thought of his dismissed manservant Williams, returned to rob him. It could not be his uncle, whom he left behind at the meeting, nor Audrey, who this afternoon was to be fitted for her wedding gown. Then the certainty of the intruder’s identity makes him take the steps two at a time. It would make perfect sense: he carelessly left the door unlocked, she let herself in.
Henry pushes open the door to his study. “Gustine?”
A gasp, sharp and girlish. Henry jumps, then sees who it is.
“Mazby. Good God. What are you doing here?”
Henry’s best student, the long-lashed, quiet Andrew Mazby, leaps back from Fos’s open torso. He holds a delicate scalpel in one hand and a pencil in the other. Beside him on the table lies an artist’s sketchbook and Henry’s copy of Albinus.
“I’m sorry to be here without your permission. No one answered my knock, but the door was unlocked,” the student stammers. He puts down the scalpel and reaches for his jacket. Henry sees he has been working on the chest cavity, sketching anterior views of the heart. “I wanted to get ahead of the other students. I should not have stayed.”
Poor young man, thrusting his arms into his jacket, smearing his forehead with pencil lead as he pushes back his thin blond hair. He is inching around behind the corpse, judging his distance to the door. Henry strips off his coat and cravat and flings them in the corner. Why is he so afraid of me? he wonders, but asks aloud, “Do you have somewhere else to be?”
Mazby shakes his head, caught between ambition and the sheer terror of spending a moment alone with Dr. Chiver. It’s true, Henry had been annoyed with Andrew Mazby for lending his name to Audrey’s misguided petition, but his desire for companionship today outweighs any residual bad feeling. He picks up the sketchbook his student left on the dissecting table and flips through.
“These are good,” he says, causing the young man to blush. “The coronary sinus is out of place here, though.”
“I know. I am weak on perspective.”
“You are much better than the others,” Henry says, hearing in his voice the same paternal tone his uncle Clanny uses when speaking to him. “You will make a fine surgeon.”
Mazby shakes his head vehemently to ward off the compliment. “I can only hope one day to be half so accomplished as you.”
Now it is Henry’s turn to color. “I’ve just come from a Board of Health meeting where my position as a doctor in this town was made perfectly clear. Don’t envy me, Mazby.”
“What happened, sir?”
The doctor walks around the table. “Our local industrialists waved their hands and pronounced us all to be healthy. There was nothing we could do to stop them. Sorry to inform you, friend,” Henry leans over the cadaver Fos. “But you died of summer diarrhea.”
“But, Dr. Chiver,” Mazby sputters like a dutiful student, “the death rolls today listed another twelve cut down, and I know of at least twenty more cases languishing near the quay.” Mazby would go on, but Henry is tired of arguing.
“History will have the final word,” Henry says simply, wanting to put this day behind him. “Now tell me what you were working on when I came in.
“I was trying to determine the effects cholera had upon her heart, to make it withdraw so deeply into the chest cavity,” Mazby switches subjects just as excitedly. “I was sketching its new position and comparing it with Albums’ drawings of a normal cadaver. I am embarrassed”the boy suddenly looks away”but as I was working, this fell from between the leaves of your book.”
Mazby hands over a twice-folded canvas of Ophelia underwaterat least that is who the naked young woman, her eyes tragically fixed upon the viewer, her hair shorn away like one ready to enter a nunnery, appears to be. But the subject of this portrait could not have been further from the novitiate. Why is everything conspiring against me today? Henry wonders, taking the painting Dr. Knox commissioned of Mary Paterson. He hasn’t looked upon it in two years.
“She’s lovely,” Mazby says.
“Observe your teacher’s guilt,” Henry says quietly, folding over the naked length of the girl’s body so that only her sad face remains visible. “This was the sixth victim of Burke and Hare.”
Mazby pulls back in alarm, as if touching the painting had in some way stained him with the crime. Of course the student has heard the rumors, but Dr. Chiver has never come right out and confessed to any involvement. Shy, gentle Mazby feels suddenly important, and more than a little apprehensive at this sudden confessional turn of events. “I was led to believe no one from the medical school was charged,” the boy says, hoping to spare his teacher the obvious discomfort he himself is experiencing. “You were not to blame.”
“They would never have murdered had we not provided the market.”
The doctor covers Mary Paterson’s face and unfolds her torso and long legs, floating in their trough of whiskey. “I realized something about myself today, Mazby. I am no better than Londonderry or any of the others looking after their own interests. We thought only of ourselves back at Surgeons’ Square; we became reckless of everything, save the object of our own pursuit. The worst part is, I feel the old sickness upon me again. If I continue in anatomy, I don’t know if I’ll ever be free of it.”
“Please, sir, don’t talk that way,” Mazby cries, never before having seen his teacher so morose. “There are alternatives to grave robbing and murder.”
“The Anatomy Act?” Henry laughs. “Parliament will supply us with all the bodies we need, but at what cost? No matter what, the poor cannot help but know they are worth more to us dead than alive.”
“I beg your pardon, Dr. Chiver,” Mazby ventures. “If you are opposed to the Anatomy Act, and you have no desire to consort with resurrection men, why were you not supportive of Miss Place’s petition?”
This boy is so young; Henry sighs, feeling far older than his thirty-two years today. But Henry took a valuable lesson away from Edinburgh. Aside from his students, few of the wealthy rallied around Dr. Knox when the news broke of the Burke and Hare murders, even though his experiments upon those beggars were designed to benefit them, to teach the surgeon’s knife how best to avoid the rich man’s artery and least afflict the rich man’s nerve. Yet everyone from Robert Christison to Sir Walter Scott condemned their former friend. The wealthy do not care how we learn to heal them; the sin lies in calling attention to our methods.
“I wish I had the strength to be a crusader, Mazby, I do,” Henry says, “but there are other things I would rather concentrate on. Getting to the root of this disease, for one.” He gestures to the cadaver Fos. “We have a choice: we can stop and try to change the world or we can get on with our work, as imperfect as it is, and change men’s minds through progress.”
Mazby nods, understanding his teacher’s position, and yet feeling in some small way that Dr. Chiver’s fiancee is the braver of the two. Henry returns the portrait of Mary Paterson to his copy of Albinus and carries the book to its shelf. Knox had commissioned the work for use in his classes, as the most perfect specimen of female musculature he’d ever seen. He bade Henry have it when he left town, but the young anatomist has never had the heart to frame it.
“I feel I’m standing on a threshold, Mazby,” he says, surprising even himself with his confession. “On one side, my old life, stacked high with corpses; on the other, the promise of a new life, preventing disease, growth as opposed to decay.”
“But you always told us one was not possible without the other.”
“I always believed that,” Henry says, holding his book to his chest. “But I may have found an alternative. I am negotiating with a woman to raise up her child. He was born with nearly complete ectopia cordis.” Henry pauses as his student’s eyes widen in disbelief.
“You can actually see externally?” Mazby gropes for the words, and Henry finishes for him”the struggles of the human heart. Yes.”
“Only the mother has suddenly become recalcitrant.” Henry frowns to remember Gustine’s set, downcast face as he let her off near the corner of Mill Street last night. He had honestly expected to receive some word from her today.
“My uncle is a solicitor,” Mazby offers, as if reading Henry’s thoughts. “I’m sure if it is in the best interests of all concerned, legally she could be made to part with it.”
Henry pauses in putting away his book and stares long and hard at the young man. Gustine is barely a child herself; he can’t imagine that any court in the country would find her a fit mother. Why should he not apply for legal custody and settle the matter quickly?
Henry smiles honestly for the first time today and claps his student on the shoulder. “Mazby, don’t let anyone say you won’t make an excellent doctor.”
“Here’s my uncle’s address,” Mazby says, scribbling and glowing with. delight. “I’ll tell him to expect you.”
“Tomorrow,” Henry nods.
Mazby collects his pad and follows his teacher downstairs. Outside, the costers plying Nile Street have bundled up against a lightly drizzling sleet. One man, an apple monger, has insulated himself with contraband copies of
DEATH
ACCUSING
THE
RICH; Henry can see the high hair and red words bleeding through his thin cotton shirt.
“I deeply respect die moral dilemma you face in securing bodies for us, sir,” Mazby says, turning to Dr. Chiver in the doorway. “If nothing else, these dark days could bring a little relief to that anxiety. No one can blame you for what use you make of an epidemic.”