by E. J. Levy
Eager to distinguish myself, I did not evade notice, as I should have sought to do. In my anxiety to appear friendly, I interrupted conversations, held forth irrelevantly on matters unrelated to me; I was overly familiar where formality was required, formal where intimacy was called for. Eventually I settled on being distant but polite.
I spent my first weeks in the lecture halls in a state of barely contained panic, heart pounding, hands shaking as I struggled to take notes, afraid of being noticed, terrified of going undistinguished. I yearned to be home with my mother in the little apartment in Lothian Street, free of observation and of the chest bindings that chafed and made it hard to breathe, the wet air making the bandages moist and irritating against my skin, raising red welts that festered, peeled white, and smelled sour; I observed other boys, a few like myself, who sought to ingratiate themselves into the ranks of the more at ease. I noted above all how those timid boys laughed when others laughed at them, as if they didn’t mind.
A few weeks into the term, an enormous boy from Canada, Chesterton, as he was called, drew in his elbows to his waist, as I did mine, and let forth a flurry of words in a high-pitched voice in obvious parody of me, as a group of us stood talking in the hallway before lecture. I knew that I should laugh, make light of the insult as others did, accept my low rung in the hierarchy of boys becoming men, but something in me rebelled against the injustice, perhaps the same muscle that twitched in my contumacious uncle; the casual humiliation of the vulnerable by the powerful struck me as monstrous, an outrage, as if it were emblem of all that learning, study, civilization, and revolution were meant to eradicate and which I must in turn stamp out wherever I found it, and so I surprised myself and my tormentor when instead of laughing at the joke, I raised my fist like a cudgel and hit him squarely in the face. I insisted he apologize at once.
Silence fell and it occurred to me to run. The boy I’d hit was much larger than I; almost everyone was. If he struck me, he might kill me without even intending to, given his preposterous size. But I resisted the impulse. He touched his nose and frowned. “Bloody hell,” he said. Blood had begun to leak from his nostril.
“Apologize,” a voice said, and I wondered if I had spoken again; I had wondered at my courage to speak at all, as if some other self had stepped forward. But it wasn’t me. All eyes had shifted to someone behind me.
It was an elegantly dressed student, whom I’d seen in the lecture hall.
“You owe him an apology,” he said. “Apologize.”
“He hit me, Jobson.”
“You insulted him.”
“For Christ’s sake, Chester, just apologize; we’ll be late to Monro’s lecture.”
“It’s not my fault,” the Canadian protested. He lurched toward me, and I stepped back in fear, but he only cuffed me on the arm.
“Apologies,” he said.
“Accepted,” I said.
And we all went in. I walked far down the stairs to find a seat near the front of the hall, a place I never sat; I knew better than to sit so close, given students’ penchant for pelting Dr. Monro with peas and rotten fruit in protest of his incompetence, but I wanted to be alone, to calm myself.
Monro’s anatomy lectures were soporific as chloroform and his cadavers were always long past their prime and of truly appalling smell; his excavations of the body bordered on the criminal and the comic, both. Everyone had heard the stories. Once, while seeking to display a uterus, he’d hauled out the bladder instead and a length of fetid intestine that slid to the floor with a terrible wet sound, prompting jeers and an exodus of students from the lecture hall. He was said to have wrenched off a finger once while trying to dissect a hand, and I myself would later witness him rummaging about in search of a gall bladder, like a man desperately seeking a sock in a cluttered drawer. “It’s in here somewhere,” he kept repeating, as if we might find the words encouraging.
So I was surprised when the well-dressed boy who’d spoken up for me took a seat beside me.
“He’d have killed you, y’know,” the boy said, slipping into his seat. “Why in the world did you hit him like that?
“He had insulted my honor,” I said. I struggled to keep my voice deep.
“I know why you hit him, but why like that, with your hand like a mallet? Have you never thrown a punch before?”
In fact, I hadn’t.
He took it upon himself to try to teach me in the weeks that followed, to show me how a sharp jab from the chest could land a blow, but I didn’t practice as he urged. We both knew that I had better avoid such altercations in future. Or risk being killed.
John Jobson—the boy who rescued me that day—was a good-natured and unimaginative fellow, with the easy manners and generous heart of one whose wishes have ever been indulged, for whom privation is as remote as their own demise, a second son whose chief qualifications for the practice of medicine appeared to be a strong stomach and a father with £10,000 a year in Wales. He displayed an Olympian lack of curiosity when it came to the body’s intricate structures—the fretwork of musculature and tendons, veins and nerves, the magnificent clockwork parts—and a majestic indifference to smell. He possessed what I’d later learn from Lord Somerton are the virtues of a good hound: loyal, attentive to whatever he pursued, oblivious of the rest. My first boyhood friend.
It was precisely Jobson’s lack of imagination that secured our friendship. Whereas other students quickly took note of my voice—squeaky and high—and my too-smooth cheek, Jobson was generously oblivious of such details. He seemed to see only a frail Irish boy, rather younger than the rest, whose protection he sought to secure as he might have done for a wounded starling, a squirrel, or a rabbit.
He had, in short, a tender heart and—though hardly taller than I—an athlete’s powerful build and the sportsman’s unencumbered view of life: that of quarry and hunter. The landscape he traversed in the pursuit was of only incidental interest. He had grown up in the country with an open and gentle nature, his face more freckle than skin, his hair a disheveled mop of pale brown, the sort of kindly boy whom others naturally tormented, although he was so good-natured and robust that he won respect in place of contempt.
After our lectures, Jobson joined the others to drink in public houses and whore, and pursue the pranks that were the medical student’s first attempt to make his name, as doctors must. He did his best to instruct me in the manly arts of beer guzzling and belching, bare-fist boxing and brothels, but I was more Beau Brummell than Jem Belcher. I preferred to return to my rooms to read and study Latin.
In truth, there was little to distract me from my studies, although Jobson made a herculean effort. He was naturally kind, and exceedingly generous. He often stood me and other students for a drink or a meal when we hadn’t time between lectures to return home, and he seemed sincerely grieved when I failed to join them in the evening.
I knew that I was considered aloof and eccentric by the other students, unduly reticent. But the convivial fraternity of my fellow students was not one I was eager to join; their raucous parties featured ample beer and pranks—wrenching knockers off doors and painting anatomical details on local sculptures (a practice that Jobson maintained had reputable classical origins: “Alcibiades knocked the pricks off priapic sculptures for sport,” he said. “It’s good fun”).
It wasn’t snobbery that kept me apart, but fear. Fear of exposure and of failure both—I studied every waking moment when I was not at university lectures or at Barclay’s or Fyfe’s for tutorials in dissection. Unlike Jobson and the others, I could not depend on family wealth should I fail my exams in three years’ time, as many did on the first try. My mother and sister depended on me to pass, so we might leave this purgatory of penury and social isolation and enter a more secure condition abroad in Caracas with the general, where I might throw off my disguise and practice medicine openly, where our origins would not be closely considered, where we’d be well beyond the reach of my father and brother.
Not knowing
how much would be required to pass our exams, which a fair portion of the students failed each spring, I studied with fierce self-discipline; I made myself sick staying up late and alone to memorize Latin and anatomy.
Ours was to be a three-year course, covering a range of practical and theoretical studies: anatomy, natural and moral philosophy, medical jurisprudence, and Greek; chemistry, botany, materia medica (pharmacy), and the theory and practice of medicine. In addition to attending lectures and wards at the Royal Infirmary, I would undertake an oral examination and written exams on the whole of my studies, culminating in a defense of my dissertation in Latin conducted by a panel of professors.
Classes were held in the surgical amphitheater, the lecture room, and bedside, and—if one had the money, which thanks to Lord Basken’s generosity I did—in private tutorials in dissection, where the most valuable lessons might be learned. The leading surgeon of the day, Sir Astley Cooper, was known to exhort his students in London to look to themselves to learn their profession: “Never mind what others may say,” he said. “No opinion or theories can interfere with information acquired from dissection.” I would attend Barclay’s and Fyfe’s private dissection lectures for all three years—1810 to 1812—inspired by his words.
A grim snow fell as Jobson and I made our way to Dr. Fyfe’s for our first private dissection that evening in January 1810—a few weeks into the term; our shoulders fell together companionably as we walked the uneven cobblestones. Despite the brooding cold, I found Edinburgh more thrilling than anywhere I’d ever been, save perhaps for Mirandus’s library in London. Still, the weather oppressed me.
“If Edinburgh is truly the Athens of the North,” I told Jobson, as we walked, “it’s no wonder Socrates killed himself.” I missed Mirandus and his little family. I missed the stinking agate-green Thames and the little garden and our walks through the wide green expanses of Hyde Park.
“It’s not so bad,” Jobson said. “After a few pints. Join us tonight, why don’t you?”
I shook my head. “I’ve reading to do for Hamilton, and Monro.”
“You can’t be serious,” Jobson said. “You study for Monro? The only study required for his lectures is how to stay awake.”
“The man’s dullness is so extreme,” I said, “it’s almost an attainment.”
Monro’s incompetence was one reason we were there that night to attend the dissection tutorial at Dr. Fyfe’s home in Horse Wynd, as later we’d study with the famous Dr. Barclay, whose school in Surgeon’s Square was in such high demand that even with six tutors Barclay often had to lecture twice each day to keep up.
“If Barclay ever runs short of corpses,” Jobson said, “perhaps he might look into retrieving the bodies of students bored to death by Monro.”
I laughed.
We joked, in part, to dispel the fear we felt; we’d all heard stories of these tutorials: of a man’s head cleaved open on a table, an arm discarded on the floor, fingers and hands tugged on by rats and fought over by hungry birds in the corners of the room. How students fled their first dissection, sick from the smells or the sights.
But our true dread was of contagion, or should have been. Despite the Murder Act—which had legalized autopsy 60 years before, providing medical men with the corpses of those hanged for murder—there were never enough bodies to go around. We took what we could get. It was understood that our tutors bought corpses where they could; if consumption had been the cause of untimely death, the Resurrectionists who provided them didn’t know it. Nor did we.
The Murder Act had made autopsy possible by providing medical men with legal corpses, but the taint lingered like the scent of rot, giving our work a criminal air. It didn’t help our reputation that the church still considered human dissection a sacrilege, and there were always too few bodies available, despite the flourishing state of homicide, so our work had all the glamour of grave robbing. The effort to dress up our suppliers in religious rhetoric did not improve the matter: call them Resurrectionists as we might, they remained grave robbers and body snatchers in the popular imagination, a breath away from murderers themselves.
When we reached Fyfe’s home, we were let into the front hall by a servant who led us back to a chill, dim room at the rear of the house, a room illuminated faintly by candlelight; it took a moment for my eyes to adjust, distracted by the appalling smell. That was my first impression: a scent solid as sound, like the streets of Cork after the autumn slaughter when offal rotted in the lanes. The reek of mortality is sweet and fetid, emetic. The stench of three-days-dead, the putrid sweetness of decay and rotting flesh.
Jobson appeared to take no notice—he strode straight up to the corpse on the table as if to introduce himself, as if approaching the host of a party or a bar in a public house, as if he expected the cadaver to sit up and address him by name.
I pressed a kerchief to my nose to stifle a gag as I made my way slowly to the center of the room, where the body lay, undisturbed as yet, upon the table surrounded by tall stools. I was conscious of the scent of wine and smoked meat, which I’d later learn were sometimes used to preserve corpses; across the room lay another body on another table, the floor slick with fat and flesh; cast-off digits jerked as rats gnawed the bones. It was like stumbling into someone else’s nightmare.
The body laid out on the dissecting table was grey as marble in the low light, skin mottled with dark spots; it was surprisingly hard when I touched it, and cold; the skin of the face and chest had contracted like stretched canvas, making it difficult to discern whether this had once been man or woman. A cloth draped its waist; an unusual gesture, I’d learn; I wondered who’d put it there. Why. Despite the reek of rot, I did not feel the horror I’d prepared for. I searched in vain for the revulsion I’d expected and found only an uneasy excitement, like that I’d later glimpse in the faces of my fellow students in brothels.
When Dr. Fyfe joined us some minutes later, dressed in a bloodied smock, we arranged ourselves around the table. Fyfe commenced that first session with an exhortation, borrowed from the English surgeon Thomas Chevalier: “Gentlemen, you must know the magnificent machinery of the body as precisely as the great artist knows its outline to translate it to paint or stone.”
My uncle would have been delighted.
“Pompous ass,” Jobson whispered to me.
I nodded, but in truth I was entranced. I loved the bombast and the secretive nature of our proceedings, these solemn rites, which felt ancient and vaguely religious, though I had scant belief in theology, which seemed—from what I’d observed—more an impediment than a spur to understanding in our age. This seemed a truer religion than the one I’d got from the priests in Cork. The sacrament of body. I longed to be among the initiated, to enter into its mysteries.
Having gathered us around the corpse, Fyfe drew a blade from his cutting kit and made the first incision, starting at the throat and bisecting the cadaver down the sternum, then below the clavicle before he lifted with forceps the mottled grey-blue skin to reveal grey flesh and pale bone within; blood black as coal seeped out at the seam where he cut. I saw Chesterton turn away.
Fyfe continued to cut, as if skin were dense fabric, naming what he encountered as he went, splaying the skin, taking a saw to the sternum and ribs, cracking open the chest to reveal the fleshy pulp of heart and lungs. He yanked out a grey lung like a useless wing before continuing the autopsy in detail to the waist, where he removed the cloth that had concealed the sex. An aged woman, not an aged man, the distinctions few in death.
At the end of that first evening’s session, Fyfe—perhaps conscious of the high fees we were paying for the privilege—offered each of his six pupils the opportunity to claim a memento. I thought it ghoulish, but Jobson clucked with delight.
“I’ll take an ear,” he said cheerfully, politely, as if it were a cut of meat at dinner.
Someone else beside me proposed to take the tail, which got a laugh.
Chesterton took a nipple.
; I declined.
It was one thing to disregard the superstitious fear of sacrilege with which the religious condemned dissection, fearing that we might be stealing souls, desecrating God’s handiwork; it was quite another to reduce the body to a trinket, a mere commodity to be trafficked. When we left the dissection room, I felt light-headed and stepped away from the others and bent over into the street behind a lamppost, and was—for the first and only time there—sick.
In da Vinci’s day, it had been a scandal to look on women’s living bodies, so Michelangelo painted men, my uncle Jonathan had told me, pushing the picture book toward me, one of the few times he’d deigned to speak to me the summer that we met. “Look,” he’d said. “His Mary Magdalene has the arms of a stable hand.” Now when I looked on the Renaissance madonna, I would see those arms and think of the names of the muscles along the shoulder, the upper arm. Names I could recite like lines of a poem by Dryden or Cowper, and which seemed as beautiful to me.
I could not help but wonder, then as now, When we look at a man or a woman, what is it that we see? We make too much of the difference: having been both, I can say the distinctions are both greater and less than they appear. As a surgeon, I can attest that once the skin is peeled back, the distinctions are few; save for the reproductive organs, one cannot tell man from woman—one cannot say, This is a woman’s brain or lungs, a man’s heart. They think and beat just the same.
But there were, of course, a few irrefutable differences, which imposed themselves each month, reminding me of my past, my secret, of the need to conceal both.
Occasionally a fellow student would fall ill and not return to class and we would hear that he’d been taken by consumption, which was rumored to be the source of the steady stream of corpses whose company we enjoyed.
But arrogant with youth and its delusion that age, infirmity, and death are things that happen to other people—to one’s parents, say, who have foolishly failed to retain the youth and health that we possess—we imagined that, like death itself, contagion could not touch us.
