How precisely with clamps and scalpel she peels back the skin; with what rapt fascination she traces veins, arteries, nerves and lymph! Well-fed, content, with pudgy, canny hands, she pries and prods and shapes and reshapes.

Art, and what’s art. “Happy to serve,” quotha, “happy to teach. Come in, look, listen! Here the nerves of the eye! Here a gravid womb spilling its precious cargo! Limbs and organs and lives have I, in wax and pickled flesh, and twice a dozen skeletons in all sizes from infants to adults. Come in! Here’s a hand, here’s a row of testicles. Look close!”

And how they came to see her! Though perhaps not as respected at home as she deserved — as Jesus among the Nazarenes — in her own way she was as big a draw as the great University and the scrappy little Institute, until Time touched her with its implacable hand and she went, taking the city and her reputation with her.