The autopsy began at 11 a.m., but it didn't go according to plan.

The crowd of students who had filled the medical theater were there to learn what they

could from the subject on the table, but the work turned out to be more complicated

than the lecturers had expected.

For the longest time, the Deadman's chest refused to give way to their scalpel blades.

Finally, though, shortly before the lecture was scheduled to end, one of the medical instructors

managed to cut through the corpse's abdomen, but when he did, he sighed with frustration.

It was just one more example of the same condition they had seen so many times before, a sandy

diaphragm.

The classroom emptied.

All of the students had decided that lunch was a better use of their time and migrated

out of the room.

But when the theater was empty, one student silently crept back inside.

His name was James Paget, and like all the other students, he attended St. Bartholomew's

in London because he wished to become a physician, but he was also a bit more curious than most

of them.

Sneaking down to the corpse on the table, he carefully took a sample of the infected

tissue that his instructor had called sandy diaphragm.

Then, pulling out a hand lens, he gave the sample a closer look, and then caught his breath.

There was more to the tissue sample than the small crystal-like grains that earned the

condition its name.

Paget would later go on to use a more powerful microscope, and then write up his findings

...