Surgeons’ Hall

by E. S. Thomson

  Fat flies droned back and forth. From the corner of my eye I saw a movement – rats gnawing on something. Dr Cruikshank saw it too and clicked his tongue.

  ‘Gloag!’ he cried. A thick-set figure in a brown leather apron emerged from the shadows. ‘We seem to have rats again. Can’t you keep on top of them? Fetch Bullseye, would you?’ He sighed. ‘Might as well get the blasted creature to do something useful – and I’m not just talking about the dog!’

  Over his silken finery Dr Cruikshank had donned a brown dissecting apron, stiff with old gore and fluids. He was due to supervise the students, he said. Dr Crowe would be along soon. ‘Allardyce should be here when we have so large a class,’ he muttered. ‘Where the devil is he? And Halliday. I can usually rely on Halliday no matter what. Mr Tanhauser,’ he raised his voice. ‘Have you seen Halliday?’

  The student Tanhauser glanced at the package I carried. The fingers were protruding, stiff and grey, but his face registered neither surprise nor interest. ‘No, Dr Cruikshank,’ he said. ‘Not seen Halliday since last night. We were all out at the Golden Lion on Sink Street—’

  ‘Yes, yes, save your vile anecdotes for the common room. You were all drunk together and Halliday has not been seen since.’ Dr Cruikshank muttered an exasperated expletive. ‘Well, well, let us continue as we are for now, gentlemen, Dr Crowe will not be long, I am sure, and Dr Wragg might be prevailed upon to offer us the benefit of his great experience. Once I have visited the dead room with this fellow here I shall be right back. And Dr Allardyce may also deign to appear at some point, though I’m sure we can manage well enough without him on this occasion.’

  I followed him between the bodies to the front of the room. The students did not look up, but continued with their work. ‘Use main force, Mr Nelson!’ cried Dr Cruikshank, catching sight of a nervous student hesitating over his cadaver’s chest. ‘Cut through the ribs with the saw and then crack them. Don’t be afraid, sir, the subject is beyond screaming now.’ And to another, equally hesitant, ‘Come along, Mr Squires, get your hands inside the cavity. You will learn nothing if you just stare into his entrails! Do you hope to read your future in there? I can tell you that, sir. Failure, pure and simple – unless you step up and get in. That’s it. Right in! In, sir! Good. Good.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Gentlemen,’ he cried. ‘Forgive the interruption, but are any of your cadavers missing a hand? To be precise, the right hand?’

  The men looked up, their expressions bemused. ‘No, sir,’ came the reply. I saw one or two of them exchange a glance. Had they been present at the Exhibition that morning? I could not be sure. I saw one of them catch sight of something over my shoulder and his face assumed an expression of alarm. I looked back to see Sorrow and Silence standing arm in arm beside the door, the eyes of both fixed upon the young men as they worked. Dr Cruikshank saw them too and he smiled. ‘Miss Sorrow,’ he said, ‘Miss Silence, perhaps you would care to act as demonstrators while Dr Allardyce is absent?’

  ‘Please God, no,’ muttered Squires. I saw him bend to his work, his face closed, watching the two sisters from the corner of his eyes.

  ‘Oh, no, thank you, Dr Cruikshank,’ replied Sorrow. ‘We have just come on an errand for Uncle Strangeway.’

  Dr Cruikshank nodded. ‘Very well.’ He eyed Squires and Tanhauser, for he had seen the look of relief they had exchanged. ‘It pains me to say it, gentlemen, but those two girls are more skilled with the knife than you will ever be. The fingers of a lady are light and quick, which is more than can be said about you.’

  There were a few unattended corpses here and there, and Dr Cruikshank approached them with impatient footsteps. He went from cadaver to cadaver, lifting the sheet at the right hand. ‘No. No. No. They should not be left out unattended like this, though it seems all hands are accounted for, here at least. Whose body is this?’ he demanded irritably of a corpse that lay shrouded in the corner. ‘It stinks to high heaven.’

  ‘Wilson was working on that one, sir,’ came the reply.

  ‘And where is Mr Wilson this fine day?’

  The students shrugged. Dr Cruikshank muttered a curse. ‘Perhaps the dimmest of the lot,’ he said to me. ‘I did his father a favour in accepting him, but I rue the day. The lad’s a dolt – charming and handsome but a dolt nonetheless. He’d make an admirable physician, no doubt. I’m sure he could slap on a leech as the occasion required and dispense the necessary powders easily enough, but when it comes to anatomy and surgery he’s got the finesse of a blacksmith. Gloag!’ he cried to the squat attendant who had just returned with the dog. ‘Take Wilson’s cadaver back to the dead room. We can’t have it stinking up the place like this. Why in God’s name has it been left out if the fellow is not here?’

  ‘I wonder that Dr Crowe opened this place,’ I said as I watched Gloag wheel the body away. He threw Dr Cruikshank a dark look as he went. ‘A private anatomy school? They are not required as much as they used to be. Everything is going to the universities.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘The bodies.’

  Dr Cruikshank smiled. ‘Yes, well, we don’t do too badly, as you can see. We are associated with St Bride’s Infirmary and Workhouse, and they provide for us well enough. Admittedly, sometimes relatives try to take the bodies for burial, but deceiving the poor about where their dead family members have gone is no great hardship. We tell them we’ve buried them due to the possibility of contagion, but we haven’t. Sometimes they want proof, but most of them are easily frightened off with paperwork, or the threat of exhumation costs – exhumation for corpses that were never buried, ha ha!’

  ‘So you steal their corpses,’ I said. ‘It went on at St Saviour’s too. Not that many of our patients died,’ I added hastily. ‘As apothecary there I must say we had few deaths, all things considered.’

  ‘Of course we steal them,’ he said, as if I had no understanding of the situation. I wondered why he was so belligerent. He had no cause to be. I had the feeling it was a show of arrogance for my benefit, but I was not about to be put off by it. ‘How else are we to manage?’ he went on. ‘How else are we to get the subjects we need for students to learn their trade? Would you like to be attended to by a medical man who had only ever looked at a wax model and an anatomy manual? I think I know the answer to that.’ I could not disagree, though I did not share his casual attitude to the procurement of corpses by deceiving the friends and relatives of dead paupers.

  ‘The poor are everywhere, Mr Flockhart,’ he went on. ‘Why not use them once they are dead, for they were of little use when they were alive. Of course, it is body snatching, the same as it always was. But now it is sanctioned by the law. Now, we snatch the bodies before they have gone into the ground – a great relief to our students I’m sure. The parish undertaker and the workhouse master are our new friends, just as once we relied on the sexton, and our own skills with the spade and the hooks.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m sure the students are glad. I never liked digging myself.’

  His expression became aggrieved. ‘And yet the workhouse only deals in the very worst specimens. Vagrants and beggars, mostly. The only thing they have going for them is their lack of fat. Pity they are always so old. We really want fresh young bodies. Young and slim. No fat and good musculature.’ He gestured to the package I still carried, wrapped up in its damp newspaper. ‘The bodies that find their way into the dissecting rooms are almost always from unclaimed corpses – the old and destitute. The owner of this hand was neither of those things. It is the hand of a young man, and a well-nourished one at that. And if it were from a young cadaver, what student would waste any part of it on a practical joke?’

  ‘Then who does it belong to and where is the rest of it?’ I asked.

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘It has been cut with skill and precision. Only a medical man would know how to do that. And probably one who had undertaken more than a beginners’ class in anatomy.’

  He clicked his tongue. ‘Pranks are common, sir. And medical students
are an ebullient lot. To become a surgeon one must undertake nine hours of dissection a day, five days a week, for nine months of the year – as a minimum. It seems a lot, but it is quite essential. As a result, there is nothing but anatomy in their lives for many weeks. It is what sets them apart from quacks, from physicians – some of whom have no knowledge of the human body at all. The best dissector makes the best surgeon, there is little question about that. And there are times, sir, when the young men need a little light relief from the horror of their work.’

  ‘So now you are telling me that you think it is from an anatomy school?’

  His pushed his face close to mine, so that I could smell the hair oil that smothered his ringlets. I saw the sheen of sweat upon his brow, though the room was as chilly as a grave. ‘What I am telling you, sir, is that you should let it lie. This hand might come from anywhere.’

  I smiled, and answered mildly, ‘I hardly think so. Hands severed neatly at the wrist do not just “come from anywhere”.’

  ‘From any anatomy school then. Did you think of that?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said. I found I was enjoying his discomfiture. ‘But I am not ready to give up on this anatomy school just yet.’

  He sighed, and rubbed a hand across his eyes. We were still in the dissecting room, and although we had kept our voices low it was apparent that everyone was listening to us. ‘Well then,’ he gave me a grin that I did not like the look of. ‘We have one last place we might try.’

  He led me to the far end of the room, through a swing-door, and down a long, sloping corridor, so that I had the impression that we were heading into the bowels of the earth itself. At the end I could see another door, wide and black-painted. I had never been there before, but I knew what lay beyond.

  ‘The dead house?’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘In here we have the bodies that are awaiting dissection, as well as those that have been “started”, as it were. We have few at present that are not currently spoken for, though there was an outbreak of the cholera at St Bride’s Workhouse some three weeks ago and we benefited from that considerably. They didn’t last of course. It was not quite the season for dissections, you see, and the weather was warm for the time of year. Winter is the season. We are entering it now and I am hoping for rich pickings – if you will pardon my anatomist’s humour. The cold often sees off the weak and we are the main beneficiaries. The bodies do not go off quite so readily in the winter and we expect large classes – most lucrative.’ He pulled open the large, heavy door. A cold breath of air rolled out to greet us. It stank of flesh on the turn. I had smelled it since we had first entered the building, but in that final dark passage it had grown more pungent than ever, enveloping me like a sea, forcing its way into my mouth and nose as if I were drowning in it. Dr Cruikshank buried his face in a handkerchief for a moment, and I caught the scent of eucalyptus and camphor, two powerful oils favoured by anatomists to deaden the nose.

  The room beyond was illuminated by a number of small windows set high in the wall. They looked out at the damp grass at the back of the building. The bodies were laid out side by side, each of them beneath a dirty flap of waxed canvas, so that I was reminded for a moment of a flop house – dark, windowless rooms where the near destitute spend the night beneath a mound of filthy rags. The smell in such places is little better too, though there is something rich and animal about the stink of unwashed bodies in close proximity, something that proclaims life at its most desperate. Here, the smell was of death triumphant.

  ‘Well,’ said Dr Cruikshank with a sigh. ‘Let us draw our search to an end.’ He lifted one of the sheets. A pair of pale feet projected, the skin ingrained with dirt. The doctor tut-tutted. ‘Gloag is supposed to wash them down before they are put in here, but this one is filthy. Look at those ankles! Gloag! Gloag!’ He shouted into the shadows, though there was no answering movement, for which I was heartily glad. I could not imagine a worse place to spend one’s time. Dr Cruikshank stepped up to the next corpse, lifting the shroud at the place where the right hand should be.

  The body was a luminous white; thin, but strong, the shoulders pale and smooth. The upper arm was slender but muscular, the lower right arm freckled and covered with dark hairs. The right hand had been neatly excised at the wrist, the bones of the radius and ulna protruding from a neat cuff of receding flesh.

  I drew a sharp breath of shock and surprise. ‘Thank God!’ I whispered. ‘I was beginning to think—’

  ‘Think what, sir?’ said Dr Cruikshank. He turned to me in the gloom, his face hidden in shadow so that I could not read his expression. ‘You think this is the end? Why, it is just the beginning. How dare any man waste any part of so pristine and desirable a corpse. Let us see which man has his name to it, for they are all allocated the moment they come in.’

  He flung the sheet aside the way one might whisk a dust sheet from a piece of furniture. When I looked down I knew immediately that Dr Cruikshank was right. This was only the beginning.

  Eyes

  It is said that the last image seen in the final moment of life can be found imprinted upon the back of the eye. For those who die at the hands of another, might the face of their murderer be caught for ever, like a photograph, on the canvas of the retina?

  I have made a special study of the eyes. How many have I plucked from the sockets of the dead? Over the years, hundreds. And yet I have never seen this phenomenon – the ghostly image of a face, a room, an object, stamped on that dark surface – though I have looked many times.

  Man has been fascinated by eyes since medicine began. The ancient Greeks believed vision was possible because of a divine fire that burned within the eye itself, the lens directing that fire out into the world. And yet this is not so, for in fact the eye works as a ‘camera obscura’, with pictures of what is seen projected through the lens onto the concave surface of the retina. No wonder, then, that we who have killed should fear what final image our victim’s eyes might hold.

  More than any other organ of the body the eye breeds superstition and fear. Its sphere recalls the globe of the earth, as if our eyes are themselves tiny celestial orbs. The eye is the seat of clairvoyance and omniscience, those with ‘second sight’ seeing into the future. Would one so gifted have been able to predict my deeds? The eyes are said to be the ‘windows on the soul’, but what if the soul, like mine, is black?

  For hundreds of years people have worn amulets to ward off ‘the evil eye’, a curse transmitted through the malicious glare of the envious and hate-filled. We are doctors and anatomists here, we do not invoke the protection of charms and idols. And yet what resentment seethes amongst us, and what fury was in my eyes when I came to murder?

  We stared down at the body. It was a man, that much was evident, but it was impossible to recognise who, for the skin of the head and face had been removed in its entirety, peeled away to reveal only the red, anonymous musculature beneath. I was reminded briefly of the model we had seen at the Exhibition not two hours earlier – had so little time elapsed since then? – for the face of the corpse was not unlike the left side of that flayed model – the grinning teeth, the staring eyeballs, the red, glistening cheeks. In my pocket, my hand curled around the card that I had plucked from between the dead man’s fingers. Et mortui sua arcana narrabunt. What in God’s name had Will and I stumbled upon?

  ‘Well, well,’ said Dr Cruikshank after a moment. He bent close, so that for a fleeting, macabre moment I thought he was about to plant a kiss upon its forehead. In fact he was examining the job, and, seizing a lantern from the workbench against the wall, he bent closer still. ‘It is skilfully done and it is not unusual to start a dissection with the face.’ He stepped back and ran his eyes along the row of shrouded bodies. ‘Six,’ he said. ‘There were only five of them here yesterday, I remember it quite distinctly – in addition to the number we have upstairs.’

  He went over to a ledger that stood on a tall angled desk beside the door. ‘The bodies, and their provenance, ar
e recorded by Gloag or by one of the students. Squires and Tanhauser take turns as it gets them out of the dissecting room and makes them look useful. We must keep a record for the Anatomy Inspector. Students must sign their bodies in and out,’ he said. ‘The demonstrator initials them as they enter and leave.’ He ran a finger down the list, his lips moving as he counted under his breath. He shook his head. ‘Definitely one extra,’ he looked up at me. ‘I have no idea who he is or where he has come from. An administrative error, no doubt. I shall be sure to ask Gloag about it. The bodies come up from the workhouse and from St Bride’s Infirmary. The workhouse is indifferent to the fate of its corpses, and the hospital is hasty in its efforts to move them on.’ He chuckled. ‘Of course, we only take unclaimed bodies from both of these places. Those from the workhouse are rarely claimed.’

  ‘And those from the hospital?’

  ‘I’ve told you already.’ He had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘It’s no more or less than what happens at every anatomy school. It is necessary if we are to have a supply for the teaching of anatomy, but as a result of the haste required and the . . . the duplicity involved, mistakes are often made.’ He flung the sheet back across the flayed corpse with a practised air. ‘This fellow is one such, I have no doubt, though there is no student’s name attached to him, no label affixed to his big toe – something they all must have, once dissection has started. Of course, it’s not unusual for a body that has been acquired by unconventional means to be swiftly rendered unrecognisable.’ All at once he seemed keen for me to be gone, pulling out his watch and raising his eyebrows as if in shock at the time. ‘I will sort it out, Mr Flockhart, rest assured. And now, sir, I have an anatomy class to teach. They are awaiting me, as you saw—’