The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy by Bill Hayes Read Free Book Online Page B

enrollment—the board of governors declared that anatomy would not be taught on the hospital’s grounds themselves but close by. Right across the street, in fact. An excellent independent anatomy school had just opened and could easily accommodate the St. George’s students. What could not have been foreseen, however, was how one of the directors of the anatomy school, James Arthur Wilson, would constantly come to loggerheads with hospital administrators. A bilious-sounding character who went by the nickname Maxilla (the anatomical term for the upper jawbone, inspired by his initials, J.A.W.), Dr. Wilson was described with admirable delicacy by one historian of the period as a man “somewhat over-conscious of his own excellencies.” After one too many quarrels with Maxilla, St. George’s chief surgeon, Benjamin Brodie, ended the association between the two schools and, in 1834, financed the purchase of the Kinnerton Street facility.
    By the time Henry Gray began attending classes there in 1845, Dr. Brodie had retired as surgeon and anatomy instructor but, at age sixty-two, continued to practice medicine and was regarded as one of England’s leading medical authorities. As writer James Blomfield observes in his history of St. George’s Hospital, Brodie had attained a degree of public acclaim rarely seen nowadays: “It is difficult for those who live in the present day, with specialists for every kind of complaint, to imagine the position of a man like Brodie. He was consulted by patients of all ages and upon almost every conceivable form of accident or disease.” One famous case involved a gentleman who, in a conjuring trick gone awry, had accidentally inhaled a half-sovereign coin, which then lodged in the man’s upper right lung. However, it seems that the true performance did not start until Dr. Brodie’s arrival. Immediately, he turned the patient, Mr. Brunel, upside down, a feat made relatively easy by the man’s owning a “revolving frame,” which I will assume was like a knife-thrower’s prop: a circular board to which, under normal circumstances, a lovely assistant would be strapped at the wrists and ankles then spun while knives are hurled. Upside-down-ness did not, however, help Mr. Brunel cough up the coin. Rather, the object plugged his larynx and he began to choke. With a confident slice of a blade, Dr. Brodie opened the man’s windpipe but, even with forceps, could not dislodge the half-sovereign. Another spin on the frame, however, did the trick. Gravity, a smack to the back, and a fortuitous gag reflex caused the coin to drop quietly into the man’s mouth. In tribute to the doctor’s calm under fire, the half-sovereign and the pair of forceps became one of the exhibits in the St. George’s Pathology Museum. As for Mr. Brunel, I can only hope he had the good sense to move on to card tricks.
    Though he had left behind his role as instructor, Brodie maintained a keen interest in the medical school he had helped found, and, through one channel or another, word of the talented Henry Gray came to his attention. The most likely messenger was Brodie’s nephew-in-law, Thomas Tatum, one of St. George’s top surgeons and an anatomy instructor for almost twenty-five years. That Brodie and Gray met is a certainty, but when? Interestingly, an answer is suggested in a dinner invitation that survives to this day—Sir Benjamin and Lady Brodie inviting Henry Gray to their home on Monday, the twenty-eighth of April—though the year is uncertain. A little detective work tells me that this day/date combination occurred only three times during Gray’s adult life—in 1845, 1851, and 1856. Of the three, the first date offers the most intriguing possibilities. Monday, April 28, 1845, is eight days before Gray registered at St. George’s medical school. I find supremely satisfying the idea that this is when he first met Benjamin Brodie, the legendary man to whom, thirteen years later, he would dedicate his