‘It’s certainly a livelier place than it used to be,’ I said, looking up at the building.
At that moment the chanting stopped, to be replaced with laughter and shouting, the sound of smashing glass and furniture toppling. An instant later a pale English mastiff rushed out of the front door. It carried something in its mouth – I could not see what. A young man with his shirt sleeves rolled up and wearing a bloodied apron plunged out after it with a roar, pursuing the creature around the untidy flower bed at the front of the house. Grinning faces appeared at an upstairs window.
‘Run, Bullseye, run!’ cried a voice. There was laughter and shouting as the young man in the apron caught the dog, and prised its jaws apart. A cheer rang out as he held up what looked like a shoulder blade, still ragged with meat. He aimed a kick at the dog, and headed back into the building.
A burly man dressed in black and wearing a bowler hat – evidently the porter – came out and hauled the dog inside.
‘St Bride’s men,’ I said. ‘An animated bunch.’
‘So I see. And yet up until now I had always found medical students a rather serious set of fellows.’
‘But the ones you’ve met so far have been on the wards, trailing behind famous medical men and hoping to make the right impression. You see that they leave their obsequiousness and fear of failure behind them once the Great Men are not here. I assume Dr Crowe is about his own business somewhere else.’
I had to admit that I felt somewhat out of place. Apothecary’s Hall, where I had done my own training, had always had a more earnest air to it – most of us had worked as apprentices, earning our keep as we learned our trade before sitting the examinations. The young men who trained as surgeons and physicians at the Royal Colleges, the universities and private medical schools, had no such employment. They were often blessed with wealthy families who could support them until they found themselves a situation. They considered themselves a cut above us grubbing apothecaries, even those of us who ran the city’s great infirmaries, for that was a job no physician or surgeon would ever take on.
‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘We are here now, so I suppose we had better get on with it.’
We were greeted by the same porter we had seen dragging the mastiff into the building. The dog was now sitting beside its master’s chair in the alcove behind the front door, wet tongue lolling. The man leaped to his feet, stuffing a half-eaten pie hastily into his coat pocket. He licked his lips. ‘Got a ticket?’ he said.
‘No—’
‘No ticket, no entry. Dr Crowe’s most particular.’
‘We have no ticket because we are not here for a lecture—’
‘You wanting the ’natomy museum then? Still needs a ticket—’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We are here to see Dr Strangeway.’
‘Dr Strangeway don’t see no one,’ said the man. ‘Everyone knows that.’
‘Dr Crowe then?’ I said. ‘I have something for him.’
By now the dog was sniffing excitedly at the package projecting from my bag. The man looked at it suspiciously. ‘Meat?’ he said.
‘In a manner of speaking—’
‘Don’t trouble to deny it, sir. Dead meat it is. Bullseye ain’t never wrong.’
‘Then yes,’ I said. ‘Bullseye is quite right, and I need to see Dr Crowe or Dr Strangeway as a matter of urgency.’
Beside me, Will was looking appalled. ‘What have they done to the place?’ he said, stepping forward. ‘In only two weeks they have transformed it into . . . into . . . the antechamber to Hades!’ It was true, for the hall he had so admired on our previous visit was now thick with the sulphurous reek of cheap coal, the acrid odour of preserving spirits and the sweetish stink of decay. The pink marble tiles that had glowed warm and inviting now seemed lewdly flesh-coloured, as if we were entering a giant bodily orifice. They were covered with footprints and splattered with dark, ruddy stains – perhaps iodine, perhaps blood, I could not say. The dusty pieces of furniture had been removed, but in their place was a display case of animal bones and a bank of pigeon holes for the collection and distribution of letters.
A man emerged from what had once been the morning room, a place of light and tranquillity that had entranced Will. Now it was hazy with pipe smoke and cluttered with sagging brown armchairs. I had a brief glimpse of young men slumped upon them, some reading the newspaper, some smoking and talking, others poring over books. One fellow was peering at something suspended in a specimen jar, another was holding a skull. He had it up close to his face, a magnifying glass in his hand. There was a shout from someone, and he tossed it, like a ball, across the room to another, who was warming his backside in front of the fire. The door swung closed.
‘Mr Skinner,’ cried the porter to the young man who had just emerged. ‘If you would be so good as to take these gentlemen to Dr Crowe.’
The man Skinner seemed to be another porter, but younger and thinner than the first. We followed him through ranks of medical men gathered in the hall and waiting on the stairs.
‘So, this is now an anatomy school, Skinner?’ I said. ‘I had no idea!’
‘Our old place up at St Bride’s was too small, sir – that and the fact that the neighbours was always complaining about the noise and the smell and the comings and goings.’ He eyed me knowingly. ‘I think you understand me, sir. As soon as this place came up Dr Crowe took it. Corvus Hall Anatomy School we are, sir. Been in two weeks now, but already up and running like we was always here.’ He grinned. ‘Still making changes, mind. Dr Crowe wants it just so, though he’s much happier since we opened up the place at the back.’
The place at the back. I knew he was referring to the dissecting rooms and the dead house – a dark, icy chamber where bodies were stored prior to dissection. Built of yellow London brick, stained black by the filthy city air, its walls were damp and glistening due to its sunless position in the shadow of the main building.
Skinner ostentatiously drew out a pocket watch of battered pewter and peered at the dial. ‘Better hurry,’ he said. ‘The doctor won’t see no one after tea.’
‘Tea?’ muttered Will. ‘Hardly an occasion to present the man with a severed hand. Unless he takes his refreshment surrounded by bones and bits of pickled organs in which case all will be well.’ He watched as an orderly dressed in a brown apron started to unpack a pair of skeletons from a tea chest filled with straw. The leg bones and spines were twisted by rickets into the most grotesque of shapes. ‘Poor creatures,’ he said, staring at the serpentine spines, the curiously angled hips and the tangled, bandy legs.
‘Don’t feel sorry for them, sir,’ said Skinner. ‘They’re the Twisted Sisters o’ St Giles. Thieves and whores, the two of them. One murdered, so they say, the other hanged. Been in storage for years as we didn’t have the space at St Bride’s.’ He snapped his watch closed. ‘This way, gentlemen.’
The room we entered was quiet and comfortably furnished. ‘Does Dr Crowe live in the building too?’ I said. I could not keep the disbelief from my voice. To live amongst such noise and activity seemed inconceivable, and yet here we were, walking across soft carpets, past gilt-framed mirrors and mahogany sideboards as if we had entered the home of a prosperous West End gentleman.
‘He lives in this wing,’ replied Skinner. ‘The rest is for the use of the school. We have a much better provision here than we had at our old place – for dissections I mean, as well as teaching. We have a sluice room, a mortuary, a dissecting room large enough for twenty students at a time.’
‘Each with their own corpse?’ asked Will.
‘Oh yes!’ said Skinner, with relish. ‘And there’s a lecture theatre, a library, a committee room, an anatomical museum that’s the envy of the world, plus space for drying and preserving specimens, for clearing bones of flesh and tissue, space for storage, for students to study, the common room, rooms for lecturers. We have some of the most well-known and capable men teaching here, sir. We’re still a part of St Bride’s, of course.’ H
e gave me a smug look. ‘The best men north of the river are St Bride’s men. It was always the case.’
I said nothing. St Bride’s Infirmary had always been something of a rival to St Saviour’s, though as St Saviour’s had been smaller and more ramshackle, its patients more desperate and hopeless than those in St Bride’s further to the west, it had not been much of a competition.
We passed through another door into a small parlour. The blinds were half drawn, the room oppressively hot, and filled with the cloying scent of lilies, for a huge funereal bunch of the things stood on the sideboard.
‘Sir,’ said Skinner to someone we could not yet see. ‘If you would excuse me, sir, but—’
‘Is it Halliday?’ said an eager voice. ‘We started without you, my dear fellow, you are always so late—’
‘I’ve not seen Mr Halliday today, sir,’ replied Skinner hastily.
‘Oh,’ his disappointment was clear. ‘I thought—’
‘It’s some other gentlemen. They said it was important, sir, or I’d not have brought them through.’ He stepped aside.
Dr Alexander Crowe was one of the most famous anatomists in London, a man who had trained in Paris and Edinburgh, whose books on comparative anatomy revealed the study of thousands of animals. An expert on the human spine, his essays on the liver, the lungs, and the spinal cord graced every reputable medical library in the country. I had heard he was a man of modest habits, of humility and great privacy, and I was pleased to find that, despite occupying so lofty a place in the most arrogant of professions, all of this seemed to be true.
Dr Crowe was seated in an armchair in front of a roaring fire, a cup of tea in his hands. He was of average height and stature, with a high forehead from which sprang a halo of white-grey hair. His clothes were unremarkable – the dark waistcoat and jacket, white shirt and neckerchief showed no ostentation. He regarded us through keen blue eyes behind small oval spectacles. A tray of tea things – tea pot, cups and saucers, plates of biscuits, small cakes and coloured pastries – stood on a low table before the fire. The most unusual thing about him was his companions, for sitting on hard-backed chairs beside him were three women.
The eldest was some thirty-five years old. The other two were her junior by some fifteen years. All three were clothed in plain dark dresses buttoned high at the throat. They wore their ebony hair tightly dressed and pulled close at the nape of the neck. It was a spinster’s style, flat and dispirited. And yet rather than rendering them plain, it made them still more beautiful, accentuating their long slender necks, high cheek bones and pale skin. The younger two in particular were the most striking-looking women I had ever laid eyes on, all the more so because they were so similar to look at – sisters, clearly. Their lashes were raven-dark, their lips a bright scarlet against their icy pallor, as if their teacups contained blood, and they had each just taken a sip. One of them sat with her face in repose, looking down at her teacup. Her sister, and the older woman, turned their curious gazes upon us, their eyes large and dark, as Skinner stepped aside. The conversation – what there had been of it for their voices had been no more than a low murmur – fell silent.
Dr Crowe rose to his feet. ‘Welcome, gentlemen. You find us at tea before the afternoon classes. Pray, take a cup, and tell us how we can help?’ His voice was softly Scottish. He sounded jovial enough, though I detected a coldness in his look that made me think his natural courtesy was being sorely tested by our intrusion. But as Will and I stepped into the light his eyes lingered upon my face and, perceiving the port-wine birthmark that covered my eyes and nose like a highwayman’s mask, his expression resolved into one of genuine welcome.
‘Why, Mr Flockhart,’ he said, grasping my hand between both of his and pumping it up and down. ‘What a pleasure. We’ve met before, I think? But we are neighbours now. I was hoping you would call in. And Mr Quartermain, too, of course. Come, gentlemen, do sit down. These are my daughters,’ he waved a languid hand, as if the gesture might somehow waft their unspoken names towards us. The three women inclined their heads. Dr Crowe’s gaze shifted to take in the package still clutched in my hands. ‘Do you bring us some sticks of rhubarb from the physic garden?’ His eyes twinkled. ‘If more of us ate the stuff there would be many a physician out of the job, what?’
‘There would indeed, sir,’ I said.
‘Of course, the bowel is quite fascinating,’ added the doctor. ‘Not to mention the anus – a much underrated part of the body. What disasters befall us when it fails to work as it should! So much depends on the correct functioning of both, and yet how we take them for granted. I have a section of the bowel wall in my collection that bears a tumour the size of a grapefruit, you know. The patient died when the thing ruptured. Prior to that we had no idea what ailed him, beyond haemorrhoids and constipation of the most intractable kind. I cannot help but blame the fellow’s diet – which consisted almost solely of beef and mutton. I brought the carcinoma specimen along to the Pathological Society. You might remember it, Flockhart?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t, sir.’
‘Then I will show it to you. Strangeway made a model of it to show to the students, though we have the real thing in the museum. We have the most extensive anatomy museum outside the Hunterian, you know, though not all our specimens are kept on the premises.’ He turned to Will. ‘Forgive me, sir. You are not a medical man and this can be of little interest to you.’
‘We have over 10,000 specimens here,’ said the eldest Miss Crowe. ‘Human exhibits, rather than animal. Father’s lectures draw widely upon them.’
‘Ladies attend your lectures?’ said Will.
‘The lectures are open to all, my dear fellow. If one buys a ticket one can attend a lecture.’ Dr Crowe chuckled. ‘We must pay the bills somehow, and it is not as though the ladies are about to enter the profession – the sheer weight of knowledge required would be too much, not to mention the debilitating pressure of examinations. Just as well really, as we have too many doctors as it is. But a little knowledge of anatomy, of physiology, will serve to make them better wives and mothers. They come to the microscope demonstrations in their droves too. I’m not entirely sure why.’ He shrugged. ‘But a woman’s guineas fit into my pockets as well as anyone else’s. My daughters have attended every one of my lectures since they were thirteen years of age – just prior to the onset of the menses,’ he said, turning to me as if the word ‘menses’ might leave Will, ‘not a medical man’, once more gaping in ignorance. ‘Knowledge of the body and its changes, its functions, is desirable to anyone, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I would indeed, sir,’ I replied.
He considered me for a moment, and then said, ‘Perhaps you should consider taking your MD, Flockhart. As a surgeon-apothecary you will be something of a generalist. Times are changing, sir, and the role your kind had in the running of our great hospitals is vanishing. All that commercial grubbing about you have to do these days too,’ he wrinkled his nose, ‘it can hardly be satisfying to a man of your evident talents.’
‘I had no idea my talents were so apparent,’ I said.
‘But of course they are! I have heard of you, you know. St Saviour’s – old St Saviour’s – was a place of some renown. You and your father had a great deal to do with its reputation and it is a man’s past that makes him who he is. But it is the future that he should look to, and I sense that you need more in your life than the chasing of costive old ladies for pennies.’ He grinned suddenly. ‘Or am I mistaken? I rarely am, you know.’ He looked at Will. ‘And what of you, Mr Quartermain? Perhaps your association with Mr Flockhart has given you some appreciation of the dark arts of medicine?’ He reached down beside his chair and drew out a copy of the catalogue for the Great Exhibition. It bristled with book marks. ‘I was admiring some of these just this morning. I assume you are the William Quartermain who is credited with the illustrations on pages sixty-two to sixty-eight, page one hundred and thirty, and pages two hundred to two hundred and nineteen?’
‘Excellent!’ cried Dr Crowe. ‘I am writing a handbook on anatomy for students and I am in need of an illustrator. I see from this catalogue that you are an excellent draughtsman. I am not looking for artistic interpretation, but an accurate and precisely executed version of what you see before you. I need clarity and detail of structure. At the same time, I want my illustrations to look appealing, in the way that this catalogue – your illustrations in particular, sir – show the exhibits truthfully, whilst at the same time rendering them alluring. It is a rare skill, though I am asking for no more and no less than you have already demonstrated. Pen and ink. Specimens – dissections, organs, bones, that sort of thing. Can you oblige? Four, no, five, shillings an hour. It is a good rate, and better than most medical illustrators.’
‘I am not a jobbing artist, sir,’ said Will. ‘Nor am I a medical illustrator.’
‘But that’s the point. I don’t want a medical illustrator. I want a draughtsman. A draughtsman of your calibre. Are you in employment?’
‘I work for Prentice and Hall—’
‘And you are currently working on – what, exactly?’
‘I have just finished—’
‘Well there you are! You have finished one thing, so now you may start another. Tell your masters you are hired. As of today. Your style is clean and precise. Diagrammatic but expressive. Just what I am looking for!’
‘But sir, I cannot. My master—’
‘Your master? Prentice, you say? Thomas Carter Prentice? I believe I removed the fellow’s kidney stones some years ago. He was most obliged to me. I think I can persuade him easily enough. And as for you, Flockhart, why, we are all still awaiting the publication of your book on toxicology. You began work on it with the late Dr Bain, I recall. Perhaps you should finish it. It would be a fitting in memoriam to your old friend, would it not, and a worthy subject for your MD thesis. The examinations are in the spring. You have ample time to prepare. You may find some of Dr Bain’s papers in the attic; I believe Halliday came across a number of them when he was settling in. He’s your companion beneath the eaves, Quartermain, and a capital fellow!’
Surgeons’ Hall Page 3