I saw myself just briefly that first time. I was picking my way carefully along a rubbish strewn street in the East End. The thick fog the locals called ‘a real pea souper’ did nothing to move the putrid smell that emanated from the slimy cobbles.
A figure moved slowly toward me through the smog. Our eyes met for just a moment and he looked as startled as I felt and then turned and moved quickly into an alley.
He was me yet not me. He was unkempt and his long black coat looked threadbare. His cape hung loosely over his shoulders and did nothing to conceal his gauntness.
I was in my final year of medical school but even in my first year I would have been able to diagnose his condition at first sight. Malnutrition was common enough in this part of London.
This was not a part of the city that I would normally walk through but I was desperate to procure a corpse for dissection so I pushed on towards the Jewish quarter to meet my contact.
Because of the Jewish practice of almost immediate burial their corpses were less decayed and therefore in demand. Jewish graves were also better guarded and the few cadavers that the body snatchers were able to remove were therefor much more expensive.
As I pushed ahead through the slum, I pondered my exact likeness to the frail figure I had encountered. A clone, an exact double. Some would say an evil twin but I felt drawn to him and had a real empathy to this version of myself. What life had my doppelganger lived, I wondered, to bring him to this condition? How could we exactly resemble each other physically yet our fortunes and circumstances be so different? I determined to put the incident out of my mind for now and push on with my quest.
I did not procure a corpse that day and was in danger of failing anatomy. There would be no sympathy from the crusty old professor. Many students joked that he would be ready for the dissecting slab himself before much longer.
Obtaining a cadaver would have been much easier in his student days than it was now. The resurrection riots against body snatching and dissection outside the university were better attended each week. A Scottish cobbler was recently hanged for the murder of sixteen people whose bodies he sold to medical schools for dissection.
Graveyards were now fenced and guards hired by the wealthy. As a consequence, the scarcity and therefore the price of bodies for dissection escalated.
I told no one about my twin image but found myself drawn back to the East End slums more than once before I found him.
He was leaning against a wall as though for support and looked decidedly frailer. He startled when I stopped in front of him and for a brief moment we studied each other’s faces before he looked away.
I stepped forward and touched his thin shoulder. ‘Who are you.’ I asked and he replied in cultured French. ‘I am not you but would that I were’ he said and began to turn away. I caught his hand and curled his thin fingers around a shilling. He looked down at the coin then briefly at me again and limped away. A shilling was only a day’s wages for a working man but it was all I had with me. I hoped it would at least buy him a hot meal and maybe a warm coat. I returned often to the foul alleys where I had last seen him but without success. My doppelganger had disappeared.
At last my dissection partner Jonas sent word that he had obtained a cadaver. I collected my dissection tools and hurriedly pushed my way through the crowd of noisy protesters into the medical school.
Our corpse, an old man, was laid out on the slab and a crowd of students gathered around, keen to learn what they could from our careful dissection.
Around the next slab a crowd had also gathered and it was from them that the cries of distress and bafflement emanated. Many turned to look at me and then back to the corpse. He was clearly me.
Even the professor looked horrified as he looked from my pale face to the naked cadaver. Nothing was said and what could be said? For wasn’t I clearly gazing down in horror at this wretched version of myself lying naked on the cold marble slab?
I choked back the vomit that rose into my mouth and laying my scalpel down I reeled quickly out of the dissecting theatre.
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