You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  The high-minded purpose of these high-Victorian works comes through on every page. Bartlett and Brewer saw their works in nobly educative terms: they were bringing enlightenment to the masses. These books testify to the increasing prominence of an aspiring middle class—literate in a way their grandparents may not have been, able to buy at least a few improving books, but lacking the refinement and educational privilege of the to-the-manner-born aristocracy. Both Bartlett and Brewer were devout Christians, but they carried out their missionary endeavors with a Bible in one hand and a reference book in the other.

  CHAPTER 19 ½

  READING THE DICTIONARY

  I have defined a reference book as one nobody reads from start to finish. The thought of reading a dictionary or encyclopedia strikes many as the height of absurdity, an emblem of futility. Business writer George S. Day, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, offers advice on “Converting Information into Strategic Knowledge,” and he begins by warning executives that “Simply packing the shared knowledge base with undigested information is about as useful as reading an encyclopedia cover to cover.”1 Are You a Geek? asks Tim Collins, offering 103 Ways to Find Out. One of the signs: “You’ve read a dictionary cover to cover for pleasure.” (Worse still: “It was an Elvish or Klingon dictionary.”)2 And yet some people, not all of them geeks, have read dictionaries and encyclopedias from cover to cover—or, since many of these works are in multiple volumes, from cover to cover to cover to cover to cover to cover …

  Some people have to read them. When Robert Burchfield was commissioned to supplement the Oxford English Dictionary, he began by reading the whole thing through—all thirteen volumes, all 15,490 pages, all 1,827,306 quotations, all 178 miles of type. It is more text than many people will read in a lifetime, but the only way Burchfield could prepare himself to be editor.

  Others read dictionaries and encyclopedias when they have time on their hands. George Eliot’s idealistic young doctor Tertius Lydgate, for instance, was such a passionate reader in his youth that he would go through “any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey’s Dictionary would do,” and when bored “he took down a dusty row of volumes with gray-paper backs and dingy labels—the volumes of an old Cyclopaedia.”3 And Bertolt Brecht, in his Threepenny Novel, wrote of the ridiculous George Fewkoombey, who amuses himself with a tattered volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica he found in a lavatory.

  Others have even more time—time that has been forced upon them. When Nicolas Fréret, an eighteenth-century French scholar, was confined in the Bastille, he “was permitted only to have Bayle for his companion”—Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique.4 Two centuries later, while Malcolm X sat in prison, he, too, read a dictionary. Frustrated by his limited vocabulary—“Every book I picked up had sentences that contained anywhere from one to nearly all the words that might as well have been in Chinese”—he resolved to do something about it. “I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary.” After two days of “riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages,” he

  began copying. In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

  I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I’d written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.5

  The next day he moved on to the next page, and before he knew it he had reached the end of the letter A and the end of his notebook. Rather than stopping, he found another tablet and kept going. “That was the way,” he wrote, “I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary.”

  And some read dictionaries for the intellectual challenge. Historian William Robertson, a friend of Samuel Johnson, was a fan of his largest book; Johnson was “pleased … to be told by Dr. Robertson, that he had read his Dictionary twice over.”6 When the young Robert Browning “was definitely to adopt literature as his profession,” wrote a nineteenth-century biographer, “he qualified himself for it by reading and digesting the whole of Johnson’s Dictionary.”7 Later he told James Murray that he planned to do the same with the Oxford English Dictionary—but Browning died not long after A was published.

  Many great writers have been great readers of reference books. Walt Whitman was “an avid reader of dictionaries, which he realized were the compost heap of all English-language literature, the place where all the elements of literature, broken down, were preserved… . The nation’s unwritten poems lay dormant in that massive heap of words.”8 Leo Tolstoy loved encyclopedias, and his diary included a resolution in February 1851: “To rise at 9; to occupy myself with the Encyclopædia of Law”—Constantine Alexeyevich Nevolin’s Encyclopædia of Jurisprudence, which he read every morning from eight until noon and again from six until nightfall. His letters and diaries are full of dictionaries, encyclopedias, and Greek lexicons. The Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti “went through Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, cover to cover, with particular attention to etymologies.”9 No reader of Jorge Luis Borges, creator of the fantastic “Chinese encyclopedia” called Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge, will be surprised by his reminiscence of reading Britannica and “the German encyclopedias of Brockhaus or of Meyer” when he was a child,10 and Vladimir Nabokov kept a dictionary on his bedside table, passing insomniac nights by turning its pages.11 Aldous Huxley was another Britannica reader; he took a complete twelfth edition with him on holiday. Bertrand Russell recalled, “It was the only book that ever influenced Huxley. You could always tell by his conversation which volume he’d been reading. One day it would be Alps, Andes and Apennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath.’ ”12 Even young Bill Gates read the 1960 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia nearly all the way through,13 and Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales fondly remembers reading his parents’ copy of World Book.14

  A few readers have simply been curious to the point of masochism; others have read for the sake of reading. The Encyclopaedia Britannica office routinely received letters along the lines of “Dear Sir, You will be interested to know that I have just finished reading every word in all the 24 volumes of the Britannica. I believe I am the first person who has ever done this.”15 Making clear the magnitude of that task, A. J. Jacobs read the complete Britannica in a single year, and he reported on the experience in his book The Know-It-All. When the parcel arrived, Jacobs was overwhelmed by

  the magnitude of my quest. I’m looking at 33,000 pages, 65,000 articles, 9,500 contributors, 24,000 images. I’m looking at thirty-two volumes, each one weighing in at a solid four pounds, each packed with those giant tissue-thin pages. The total: 44 million words.16

  To put 44 million words in perspective, War and Peace is only around 560,000 words, Shakespeare’s collected works weigh in at 900,000 words, and you could read from Genesis to Revelation fifty-three times in a row in the time it would take you to read Britannica. As Jacobs immersed himself in the text, “the mind-blowing diversity of everything” made the biggest impression.17 “It’s the perfect book for someone like me,” he wrote, “who grew up with Peter Gabriel videos, who has the attention span of a gnat on methamphetamines. Each essay is a bite-sized nugget. Bored with Abilene, Texas? Here comes abolitionism. Tired of that? Not to worry, the Abominable Snowman’s lurking right around the corner.”18

  Writer Ammon Shea performed a similar experiment with the Oxford English Dictionary, pointing out, “If you were to sit down and force yourself to read the whole thing over the course of several months, three things would likely happen: you would learn a great number of new words, your eyesight would suffer considerably, and your mind would most definitely slip a notch.”19 He offered his book-length account of his efforts, Reading the OED, as “the thinking person’s CliffsNotes to the greatest dictionary in the world,” but he had to admit it is also “an account of the pain, headache, and loss o
f sanity that comes from spending months and months searching through this mammoth and formidable dictionary—and pulling together all of its most beautiful and remarkable words.”

  CHAPTER 20

  MODERN MATERIA MEDICA

  Staying Healthy

  Henry Gray and Henry Vandyke Carter

  Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical

  1858

  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

  1952

  Medical information was first written down because its volume had grown beyond the bounds of the individual healer. As the centuries passed, the volume of accumulated medical knowledge only increased. The scientific revolution brought empiricism to health, and clinical trials let practitioners figure out whether a treatment was more or less likely to lead to a cure. Meanwhile the rise of scientific journals and the systematic collection of data made medical knowledge both more accurate and more specialized. Reference books had to work hard to keep up.

  Comparing two major works on health separated in time by one long lifetime highlights the differences between Victorian confidence and modern anxiety over what constitutes health. These two works—one focusing on physical, one on mental health—trace the evolution of ideas about the relationship of the mind to body and explore the kinds of authority with which specialists made claims about both.

  Few Victorian textbooks have inspired prime-time soap operas, but one legendary guide to human anatomy has become so famous over the centuries that its name is now proverbial.

  One of the longest-lasting medical references in history had as its declared mission “to furnish the Student and Practitioner with an accurate view of the Anatomy of the Human Body, and more especially the application of this science to Practical Surgery.”1 Surgery was undergoing exciting changes in the 1850s. Anatomical education in England improved by leaps and bounds when the Anatomy Act of 1832 made it possible to get cadavers for dissection as part of a medical education without having to depend on grave robbers. And the availability of anesthesia—both ether and chloroform had been approved for use in the 1840s—was allowing surgical interventions that would once have been impossible.

  Henry Gray—“diligent and hard-working, focused, clever, ambitious”—was born in 1827 and was eager to be recognized as a great surgeon at St. George’s Hospital in London.2 Beyond that, we know next to nothing about him; he left virtually no traces of his private life. We do not even know where he attended school, only that he was a London surgeon and that the most famous of all anatomy textbooks bears his name. Gray’s Anatomy is not entirely Gray’s; he provided the text, but the woodcuts—among the most useful features of the book, and the most distinctive—were provided by a colleague, another surgeon, named Henry Vandyke Carter. We know much more about Carter, who kept a detailed diary in tiny handwriting from the time he was fourteen. Carter came from a less privileged background; he could not easily afford a university education, so he trained first as an apothecary and used his income from that, combined with money he earned as an illustrator, to advance his education. He was devastated when he failed his surgical exam the first time, but a year later he passed with honors.

  We know from Carter’s writings that the two men met in 1850, when both were working at St. George’s Hospital. Having discovered that Carter was an accomplished illustrator, Gray sought his assistance on an essay he was writing, eventually published in book form as The Structure and Use of the Spleen (1853). Carter was glad of the payment, but he was wounded when he saw the published book: Gray had neglected to credit his contribution. “See Gray’s Book on Spleen takes no notice of my assistance,” he noted in his diary, “tho’ had voluntarily promised.” Despite his Victorian stoicism, his fragmentary comment, “rather feel it,” leaves no doubt that the omission rankled.3 It was only the first of a series of struggles between the two for prominence.

  TITLE: Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical, by Henry Gray, F.R.S. Lecturer on Anatomy at Saint George’s Hospital: The Drawings by H. V. Carter, M.D. Late Demonstrator of Anatomy at St. George’s Hospital: The Dissections Jointly by the Author and Dr. Carter

  COMPILER: Henry Gray (1827–61) and Henry Vandyke Carter (1831–97)

  ORGANIZATION: By bodily system: osteology, articulations, muscles and fasciae, arteries, veins, lymphatics, nerves, sense organs, viscera, respiration, urinary organs, male then female generative organs, inguinal and femoral hernia, perineum and ischio-rectal region

  PUBLISHED: London: John W. Parker and Son, 1858

  PAGES: xxii + 754

  SIZE: 9½″ × 6″ (24.5 × 15.5 cm)

  AREA: 315 ft2 (29.5 m2)

  WEIGHT: 3 lb. 8 oz. (1.6 kg)

  PRICE: 22s.

  LATEST EDITION: Gray’s Anatomy: The Anatomical Basis of Clinical Practice, Expert Consult, 40th ed., edited by Susan Standring (Churchill Livingstone, 2009), 1,576 pages

  Gray aspired to write a truly comprehensive one-volume guide to human anatomy, superseding all the other books on the market. In November 1855, Carter made a note of a conversation: “Little to record. Gray made proposal to assist by drawings in bringing out a Manual for students: a good idea but did not come to any plan … too exacting, for would not be simple artist.”4 Carter was slow to agree to the project. Though he had already qualified as a surgeon and apothecary, he was still completing his MD degree. He was also probably still smarting from his treatment on the earlier book. Gray’s offer of £10 a month for fifteen months, though, seems to have tipped the balance in Carter’s mind, and he began in January 1856. Once they decided to work together, they moved quickly—from planning to publication in less than three years. They worked together on dissections, Gray taking notes while Carter made sketches. Dissections were no simple matter in the 1850s. They had to be done in winter, because cadavers would decay too quickly in the summer, but daylight being shorter then, they began work as soon as the sun rose high enough. Still they worked systematically through the body, preparing materials for the definitive work on human anatomy.

  Gray was the motive force for the project, and he secured a publisher. He had already published his essay on the spleen with John Parker, so Parker was the obvious choice to publish the Anatomy. But, having done that work, Gray abruptly walked out in the middle of the project when he accepted an invitation to serve as personal physician to the Duke of Sutherland on his private yacht. He got a leave of absence from his hospital duties, providing the remainder of his contributions to the book by mail and leaving Carter to handle the details of production.5

  The work is structured systematically: under the broad head “Osteology” comes a series of introductory articles—“General Properties of Bone,” “Chemical Composition of Bone,” “Structure of Bone,” and so on—followed by sections on the major classes: the spine, the skull, the thorax, the pelvis. Within each of those classes are more specific entries: “The Spine” opens with “General Characters of the Vertebræ” and “Characters of the Cervical Vertebræ,” followed by “Atlas,” “Axis,” “Vertebra Prominens,” and on through the bones of the spine. Sometimes an entry is even more specific: under the broad head “The Lymphatics” is an entry on “Cerebrum”; under “Cerebrum” comes “Boundaries of, and Parts forming the Lateral Ventricles”; under that comes “Thalami Optici.” As befits a clinical book, the tone is always clinical: the sections on “Male Generative Organs” and “Female Organs of Generation” have no time for moralizing on the one hand or tittering on the other. The language is never vulgar; Latin takes the place of the vernacular when the subject gets too explicit. But neither is there any shying away from delicate matters: “The SCROTUM is a cutaneous pouch, which contains the testes and part of the spermatic cords. It is divided into two lateral halves, by a median line, or raphe… .”6

  The book features detailed drawings—hand-colored in some editions—of the sex organs, the sort of thing that distressed nineteenth-century moralists. Carter’s illustrations, made directly onto the woodblocks that would be used
to print the images, are exemplary, providing just the right balance of naturalistic detail and schematic clarity. Carter introduced an innovation to anatomical illustration by putting his labels directly on the parts they identify, rather than relying on a clumsy system with numbers and arrows. The drawings are beautifully engraved, presumably by someone on the publisher’s staff. But the illustrations provoked last-minute panic when someone discovered that the woodblocks were almost an inch too large to fit on the paper size they had chosen.7 Recreating the images was out of the question, as was moving to a larger page size. Fixing the problem involved frantic scrambling to rearrange the pages and reduce the captions whenever possible; if no other option remained, they would have to trim the woodblocks themselves.

  A more delicate problem arose after the book was in proof. On the first proof of the title page, both contributors’ names appeared in the same size of type, though Carter’s appeared well below Gray’s; already the hierarchy of the contributors was being asserted. Gray, however, was not content. In marking the proof he crossed out Carter’s name and qualifications and added a notation for the typesetter: “Type size of the name below,” that is, smaller than his own. Where Carter’s new job title, a prestigious professorship, appeared, Gray crossed it out, adding explicit instructions—“To be omitted”—and his authorizing initials, “H.G.” The message was clear: this was to be H.G.’s Anatomy, not H.G.’s and H.V.C.’s Anatomy.8 To add injury to insult, Gray never paid Carter any of the royalties he had earned.

  The book appeared in summer 1858, in time to be adopted in medical schools for the upcoming academic year. Gray and Carter were stung by one early bad review—“low and unscientific in tone … inconsistent with the professions of honesty which we find in the preface… . A more unphilosophical amalgam of anatomic details and crude surgery we never met with”—but most of the other notices were strong, and sales were good. The review in the British Medical Journal is typical, calling Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical “far superior to all other treatises,” and “a book which must take its place as the manual of Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical.” A review from 1869 listed Anatomy among the essential books for medical students.9