Anatomy: A Love Story

On the morning of the exam, Hazel decides not to disguise herself in George’s clothes and wears a new dress instead: “The bodice was bloodred silk, with puffs of white linen at her shoulders. The neckline reached her chin, a reminder to keep it high” (383). In the city, she passes “a man in a tall hat wheeling a veiled figure in a chair” towards the Anatomists’ Society (284). Recalling Munro’s words, Hazel wonders if she should follow the man or focus on the exam. She wishes that Jack was there to advise her and then uses the secret entrance Jack showed her months ago to follow the mysterious figure.

Hazel follows the secret passage to the surgical theater, where she sees Baron Walford, the man in the tall hat, the figure in the wheelchair, and a doctor wearing unusual headgear that makes him look like “a distorted cyclops with a round glass eye set in brass” (291). The man in the top hat removes the veil, revealing a terrified blond boy. The doctor sedates both the boy and the baron with ethereum, then transplants the boy’s eye into the baron’s empty eye socket. The doctor pours a drop from a vial of golden liquid into the transplanted eye.