Scanty Particulars The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of Queen Victoria's Most Eminent Military Doctor

Chapter 1 Betwixt-and-Between "Then I shan't be exactly a human?" Peter asked. "No." "Nor exactly a bird?" "No." "What shall I be?" "You will be a Betwixt-and-Between," Solomon said, and certainly he was a wise old fellow, for that is exactly how it turned out. Sir James Matthew Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens in the frozen heart of winter, a slight figure veered along the pavements of Edinburgh Old Town. With hands thrust deep into the pockets of a man's greatcoat, the body of the young medical student was concealed completely. Only his head was visible. The night was cold and still. Streetlamps lit his way between the grand monumental portals and pillars of the University of Edinburgh. As if drunk, he lurched with an unsteady gait toward his lodgings in Lothian Street. Self-conscious about staggering on a public street, he tried to regain the more confident composure of his usual strut. It was the winter of 1810 and James Barry, medical and literary student of the University of Edinburgh, had just attended his first lecture in anatomical dissection with his tutor, the famously "horrid" Mr. Fyfe. His sickened body hastened through the streets away from Fyfe's dissection room as if pursued by death and her grotesque procession. Yet his mind raced back to the scene he had just left, drawn by an intoxicating concoction of horror and curiosity. He recalled the scene like a demonic dream. A room of instruments and shadows, the temperature of a meat locker, somewhere between an artist's studio and a butcher's shop. The air clammy with malodorous condensation. Mr. Fyfe's three greenhorn students huddled in a group, uncertain of the etiquette for approaching the dissecting table, on which a body was laid out beneath greasy sheeting. Fyfe ushered them forward, stationing each with a clear view-and smell-of the cadaver. This uncomfortably intimate proximity to a corpse not yet three days old and of uncertain origin was the privilege the students paid for in signing up with Fyfe as private pupils. A select audience of young gentlemen, with the best view in an exclusive house, were suddenly and horribly fearful of seeing what their money had paid for. The terrifying experience was optional. Practical dissection was not a compulsory part of the medical degree for which Barry had registered. While required to be proficient in written and spoken Latin, classics, and philosophy, he did not have to do applied dissection. He could have qualified by learning his anatomy from lavishly printed textbooks. But James Barry had a particular fascination with the study of anatomy, with the folds and secrets of the flesh. He breathed hard through his mouth, fighting back panic as Fyfe lifted the sheet, revealing a loose architecture of bones held together with a worn tarpaulin of skin, like an old, patched sail clinging respectfully to the mainmast in memory of prouder times. Age and the shrunken size of the body in death composed Barry's first impressions. He struggled to translate the clean and figuratively precise lines of his anatomical textbooks into the irregular landscape of the purplish swollen body laid out before him. These and his childhood imaginings, swathed in Catholicism, had left him vaguely expecting that a dissection corpse would be luminous and sepulchral, modest even. In reality, the raw material for the surgeon's knives and saws was gray, graceless, and lumpen. Heart thumping, temperature rising with the bile in his throat, in this claustrophobic space the only heat he could feel was his own. Yet in Fyfe's chilly, candlelit rooms, James Barry's cold sweat of dread turned to the heated flush of fascination. The lamplit faces of the students began to shine with curiosity, bravado, and fear as Fyfe cauterized the body. He spoke in a clear, neutral tone aimed aHolmes, Rachel is the author of 'Scanty Particulars The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of Queen Victoria's Most Eminent Military Doctor' with ISBN 9780375505560 and ISBN 0375505563.