Anatomy: A Love Story(24)
Around the classroom’s perimeter were specimen jars that had already captured the attention of the other boys who would be taking Beecham’s course: animals preserved in dingy yellow fluid, human organs, full sets of grinning teeth. Hazel noticed a jar containing a pair of tiny human fetuses, no larger than the palm of her hand, conjoined at the head. There were disembodied hands and feet, and an entire row of milky gray brains in sizes ranging from walnut to swollen grapefruit. And then forming a morbid gallery on a high shelf running across the top of the wall were the skulls, at least a dozen of them, mostly with strange deformities, all in various states of decay.
Above them, the skeleton of a massive sea creature, perfectly preserved and wired in place, dangled from the ceiling as if it were still swimming through an invisible current. Hazel was so absorbed in the strangeness of her surroundings that she didn’t notice Dr. Beecham himself standing behind the lectern until he gently cleared his throat and stretched his fingers in his gloves to make the black leather creak.
The other students were just as taken aback as Hazel: immediately, they all scrambled to their seats.
Dr. Beecham stood there while the room quieted down, letting his eyes linger on each student, one at a time. When Beecham’s eyes reached Hazel, she couldn’t help but feel her scalp become itchy underneath her hat. The pins she and Iona had used to fasten her hair were suddenly sharp. Before putting on George’s clothes, she had fantasized that they would offer more freedom than her own corset and bustle and skirt. But now, sitting in ill-fitting men’s pants, and with a shirt’s collar up to her chin, she found herself distinctly uncomfortable, sweat dampening the thick fabric at her underarms.
Beecham’s gaze dropped to Hazel’s desk, to her well-worn edition of Dr. Beecham’s Guide, peeling at the spine and spotted with brown. He gave a small, disapproving tut at the book’s deterioration, but then he mercifully passed his gaze onto the next student, a boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, still unable to grow whiskers.
“Welcome,” Dr. Beecham said finally. “Before we begin in earnest, I must offer one brief comment on a personal note. There are some—perhaps not among this group sitting before me, but surely among the various drawing rooms of London and Edinburgh and Paris—who may think that my elite position at the university and within the Anatomists’ Society is thanks to my grandfather. I assure you: I owe nothing to nepotism.”
Beecham waited to see if anyone would challenge him. Nobody did. Who would dare? Surely, Hazel thought, no one who had seen Beecham’s demonstration at the anatomy theater, the speed of his blade, the use of that … ethereum. The most senior Beecham would die all over again if he could ever have seen how much further surgery had come since his death.
Dr. Beecham stood with his posture impossibly straight as he continued his introduction. He adjusted the seam on the black leather gloves he was wearing as he spoke. “I warn you now that the course on which you are now embarking is not an easy one. It will challenge you physically. It will challenge you mentally. You will come face-to-face with the strange, the macabre. The medical field is at the cusp of great change, and I intend, with my students, to lead a charge into the future. We shall learn basic anatomy, basic physiology, surgical techniques. The fundamentals of the apothecary. By the end of my course, you shall be well prepared to sit for your Royal Physician’s Examination before Christmas, after which you will be certified to work as a physician anywhere you choose in His Majesty’s empire. The field of medicine is deadly. I would be remiss if I neglected to mention that I have lost more than one student in the time that I’ve been teaching. I like to think I have the experience to know, looking at the students now, exactly who among you will not have the fortitude to make it.” He paused. The students shifted uneasily in their seats. “Blood will stain your hands. You might find that blood may even stain your very souls.”
From behind the lectern, Dr. Beecham withdrew a rabbit. A live rabbit, apparently indifferent to being held aloft in front of a classroom, placidly gazing out toward the students. There was a wave of giggles, Hazel’s among them. Beecham raised one eyebrow and pulled the rabbit into his chest, stroking it with his long fingers.
“All that is to say,” Dr. Beecham said, “if you wish to leave this class now, I won’t hold it against you. In fact, I think self-knowledge is a form of wisdom. The field of medicine is arduous. I would be lying if I said I haven’t lost more than one patient over the course of a semester.” He pulled out a small scalpel from his pocket and examined the blade as he spoke. “To infection. To disease. To a mishandled blade. Even once”—he placed the rabbit on the lectern. It gave a small hop, but then settled in silence beneath Beecham’s hand—“to shock.”
And then Dr. Beecham brought the scalpel down onto the rabbit. Hazel gasped, but fortunately she wasn’t the only one. Beecham withdrew a handkerchief to dab at the blood splatter that landed across his forehead. “I repeat. If you wish to leave this class, do it now.” The boy next to Hazel looked close to fainting. He shoved his chair out and ran from the room. “Any others? No? Good.”
Beecham rang a small brass bell he’d pulled from behind the lectern, and an assistant in an apron came in, carrying a box of rabbits, all of which mercifully were already dead. The rabbits were distributed amongst the students, along with scalpels that looked as though they had been in use for years. Hazel peeled a brownish drop of dried blood off her scalpel’s handle.