Chapter IV: Literature (4)

It was in 1772 that Hunter, in order effectually to gauge the extent of his own knowledge, and also correctly to express his views, which had been repeatedly misstated or ascribed to others, began his lectures on the theory and practice of surgery, at first delivered free to his pupils and a few friends, but subsequent to 1774 on the usual terms, four guineas. Though Pott, indeed, had perceived that the only true system of surgery is that which most closely accords with the curative efforts of nature, a rational pathology can hardly be said to have had at this time any existence; and it was generally assumed that a knowledge of anatomy alone was a sufficient foundation for the study of surgery. Hunter, unlike his contemporaries, to most of whom his philosophic habit of thought was a mystery, and whose books contained little else than relations of cases and modes of treatment, sought the reason for each phenomenon that came under his notice. The principles of surgery, he maintained, are not less necessary to be understood than the principles of other sciences; unless, indeed, the surgeon should wish to resemble "the Chinese philosopher whose knowledge consisted only in facts." Too much attention, he remarked, cannot be paid to facts; yet a multitude of facts overcrowd the memory without advantage if they do not lead us to establish principles, by an acquaintance with which we learn the causes of diseases. Hunter's course, which latterly comprised eighty-six lectures, delivered on alternate evenings between the hours of seven and eight, lasted from October to April. Some teachers of his time were content to dismiss the subjects of anatomy and surgery in a course of only six weeks' duration. His class was usually small and never exceeded thirty. He was deficient in the gifts of a good extempore speaker, being in this respect a remarkable contrast to his brother William; and he read his lectures, seldom raising his eyes from the manuscript. His manner with his auditory is stated to have been embarrassed and awkward, or, as Adams puts it (_Obs. on Morbid Pois._, p. 272), "frequently ungraceful," and his language always unadorned; but that his "expressions for the explaining of his new theories rendered his lectures often unintelligible" is scarcely evident in his pupils' notes still extant. His own and others' errors and fallacies were exposed with equal freedom in his teaching. Occasionally he would tell his pupils, "You had better not write down that observation, for very likely I shall think differently next year"; and once in answer to a question he replied, "Never ask me what I have said or what I have written; but, if you will ask me what my present opinions are, I will tell you."

In January 1776 Hunter was appointed surgeon-extraordinary to the king. He began in the same year his Croonian lectures on muscular motion, continued annually, except in 1777, till 1782: they were never published by him, being in his opinion too incomplete. In 1778 appeared the second part of his _Treatise on the Natural History of the Human Teeth_, the first part of which was published in 1771. It was in the waste of the dental alveoli and of the fangs of shedding teeth that in 1754-1755, as he tells us, he received his first hint of the use of the absorbents. Abernethy (_Physiological Lectures_, p. 196) relates that Hunter, being once asked how he could suppose it possible for absorbents to do such things as he attributed to them, replied, "Nay, I know not, unless they possess powers similar to those which a caterpillar exerts when feeding on a leaf." Hunter in 1780 read before the Royal Society a paper in which he laid claim to have been the first to make out the nature of the utero-placental circulation. His brother William, who had five years previously described the same in his _Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus_, thereupon wrote to the Society attributing to himself this honour. John Hunter in a rejoinder to his brother's letter, dated the 17th of February 1780, reiterated his former statement, viz. that his discovery, on the evening of the day in 1754 that he had made it in a specimen injected by a Dr Mackenzie, had been communicated by him to Dr Hunter. Thus arose an estrangement between the two Hunters, which continued until the time of William's last illness, when his brother obtained permission to visit him.

In 1783 Hunter was elected a member of the Royal Society of Medicine and of the Royal Academy of Surgery at Paris, and took part in the formation of "A Society for the Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge."[17] It appears from a letter by Hunter that in the latter part of 1783, he, with Jenner, had the subject of colour-blindness under consideration. As in that year the lease of his premises in Jermyn Street was to expire, he purchased the twenty-four years' leasehold of two houses, the one on the east side of Leicester Square, the other in Castle Street with intervening ground. Between the houses he built in 1783-1785, at an expense of above L3000, a museum for his anatomical and other collections which by 1782 had cost him L10,000. The new edifice consisted of a hall 52 ft. long by 28 ft. wide, and lighted from the top, with a gallery all round, and having beneath it a lecture theatre. In April 1785 Hunter's collections were removed into it under the superintendence of Home and William Bell,[18] and another assistant, Andre. Among the foreigners of distinction who inspected the museum, which was now shown by Hunter twice a year--in October to medical men, and in May to other visitors--were J. F. Blumenbach, P. Camper and A. Scarpa. In the acquisition of subjects for his varied biological investigations and of specimens for his museum, expense was a matter of small moment with Hunter. Thus he endeavoured, at his own cost, to obtain information respecting the Cetacea by sending out a surgeon to the North in a Greenland whaler. He is said, moreover, to have given, in June 1783, L500 for the body of O'Brien, or Byrne, the Irish giant, whose skeleton, 7 ft. 7 in. high, is so conspicuous an object in the museum of the College of Surgeons of London.[19]

Hunter, who in the spring of 1769-1772 had suffered from gout, in spring 1773 from spasm apparently in the pyloric region, accompanied by failure of the heart's action (Ottley, _Life_, p. 44), and in 1777 from vertigo with symptoms of angina pectoris, had in 1783 another attack of the last mentioned complaint, to which he was henceforward subject when under anxiety or excitement of mind.

In May 1785,[20] chiefly to oblige William Sharp the engraver, Hunter consented to have his portrait taken by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He proved a bad sitter, and Reynolds made little satisfactory progress, till one day Hunter, while resting his somewhat upraised head on his left hand, fell into a profound reverie--one of those waking dreams, seemingly, which in his lectures he has so well described, when "the body loses the consciousness of its own existence."[21] The painter had now before him the man he would fain depict, and, turning his canvas upside down, he sketched out the admirable portrait which, afterwards skilfully restored by H. Farrar, is in the possession of the Royal College of Surgeons. A copy by Jackson, acquired from Lady Bell, is to be seen at the National Portrait Gallery, and St Mary's Hall, Oxford, also possesses a copy. Sharp's engraving of the original, published in 1788, is one of the finest of his productions. The volumes seen in Reynolds' picture are a portion of the unpublished records of anatomical researches left by Hunter at his death, which, with other manuscripts, Sir Everard Home in 1812 removed from his museum, and eventually, in order, it has been supposed, to keep secret the source of many of his papers in the _Philosophical Transactions_, and of facts mentioned in his lectures, committed to the flames.[22]

Among the subjects of Hunter's physiological investigation in 1785 was the mode of growth of deer's antlers. As he possessed the privilege of making experiments on the deer in Richmond Park, he in July of that year had a buck there caught and thrown, and tied one of its external carotid arteries. He observed that the antler which obtained its blood supply therefrom, then half-grown, became in consequence cold to the touch. Hunter debated with himself whether it would be shed in due time, or be longer retained than ordinarily. To his surprise he found, on re-examining the antler a week or two later, when the wound around the ligatured artery was healed, that it had regained its warmth, and was still increasing in size. Had, then, his operation been in some way defective? To determine this question, the buck was killed and sent to Leicester Fields. On examination Hunter ascertained that the external carotid had been duly tied, but that certain small branches of the artery above and below the ligature had enlarged, and by their anastomoses had restored the blood supply of the growing part. Thus it was evident that under "the stimulus of necessity," to use a phrase of the experimenter, the smaller arterial channels are capable of rapid increase in dimensions to perform the offices of the larger.[23] It happened that, in the ensuing December, there lay in one of the wards of St George's Hospital a patient admitted for popliteal aneurism. The disease must soon prove fatal unless by some means arrested. Should the surgeon, following the usual and commonly fatal method of treatment, cut down upon the tumour, and, after tying the artery above and below it, evacuate its contents? Or should he adopt the procedure, deemed by Pott generally advisable, of amputating the limb above it? It was Hunter's aim in his practice, even if he could not dispense with the necessity, at least to diminish the severity of operations, which he considered were an acknowledgment of the imperfection of the art of healing, and compared to "the acts of the armed savage, who attempts to get that by force which a civilized man would get by stratagem." Since, he argued, the experiment with the buck had shown that collateral vessels are capable of continuing the circulation when passage through a main trunk is arrested, why should he not, in the aneurism case, leaving the absorbents to deal with the contents of the tumour, tie the artery in the sound parts, where it is tied in amputation, and preserve the limb? Acting upon this idea, he ligatured his patient's femoral artery in the lower part of its course in the thigh, in the fibrous sheath enclosing the space since known as "Hunter's canal."[24] The leg was found, some hours after the operation, to have acquired a temperature even above the normal.[25] At the end of January 1786, that is, in six weeks' time, the patient was well enough to be able to leave the hospital. Thus it was that Hunter inaugurated an operation which has been the means of preserving to hundreds life with integrity of limb--an operation which, as the Italian P. Assalini, who saw it first performed, testifies, "excited the greatest wonder, and awakened the attention of all the surgeons in Europe."

Early in 1786 Hunter published his _Treatise on the Venereal Disease_, which, like some of his previous writings, was printed in his own house. Without the aid of the booksellers, 1000 copies of it were sold within a twelvemonth. Although certain views therein expressed with regard to the relationship of syphilis have been proved erroneous, the work is a valuable compendium of observations of cases and modes of treatment (cf. John Hilton, _Hunt. Orat._ p. 40). Towards the end of the year appeared his _Observations on certain parts of the Animal Oeconomy_, which, besides the more important of his contributions to the _Philosophical Transactions_, contains nine papers on various subjects. In 1786 Hunter became deputy surgeon-general to the army; his appointment as surgeon-general and as inspector-general of hospitals followed in 1790. In 1787 he received the Royal Society's Copley medal, and was also elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. On account of the increase in his practice and his impaired health, he now obtained the services of Home as his assistant at St George's Hospital. The death of Pott in December 1788 secured to him the undisputed title of the first surgeon in England. He resigned to Home, in 1792, the delivery of his surgical lectures, in order to devote himself more fully to the completion of his _Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation and Gunshot Wounds_, which was published by his executors in 1794. In this, his masterpiece, the application of physiology to practice is especially noticeable. Certain experiments described in the first part, which demonstrate that arterialization of the blood in respiration takes place by a process of diffusion of "pure air" or "vital air" (i.e. oxygen) through membrane, were made so early as the summer of 1755.

Hunter in 1792 announced to his colleagues at St George's, who, he considered, neglected the proper instruction of the students under their charge, his intention no longer to divide with them the fees which he received for his hospital pupils. Against this innovation, however, the governors of the hospital decided in March 1793. Subsequently, by a committee of their appointing, a code of rules respecting pupils was promulgated, one clause of which, probably directed against an occasional practice of Hunter's, stipulated that no person should be admitted as a student of the hospital without certificates that he had been educated for the medical profession. In the autumn two young Scotchmen, ignorant of the new rule, came up to town and applied to Hunter for admission as his pupils at St George's. Hunter explained to them how he was situated, but promised to advance their request at the next board meeting at the hospital on the 16th of October. On that day, having finished a difficult piece of dissection, he went down to breakfast in excellent spirits and in his usual health. After making a professional call, he attended the board meeting. There the interruption of his remarks in behalf of his applicants by a flat contradiction from a colleague brought on one of the old spasmodic heart attacks; he ceased speaking, and retired into an adjoining room only to fall lifeless into the arms of Dr Robertson, one of the hospital physicians. After an hour had been spent in vain attempts to restore animation, his body was conveyed to his house in a sedan chair.[26] His remains were interred privately on the 22nd of October 1793, in the vaults of St Martin's in the Fields. Thence, on the 28th of March 1859, through the instrumentality of F. T. Buckland, they were removed to Abbot Islip's chapel in Westminster Abbey, to be finally deposited in the grave in the north aisle of the nave, close to the resting-place of Ben Jonson.

Hunter was of about medium height, strongly built and high-shouldered
and short-necked. He had an open countenance, and large features, eyes
light-blue or grey, eyebrows prominent, and hair reddish-yellow in
youth, later white, and worn curled behind; and he dressed plainly and
neatly. He rose at or before six, dissected till nine (his breakfast
hour), received patients from half-past nine till twelve, at least
during the latter part of his life, and saw his outdoor and hospital
patients till about four, when he dined, taking, according to Home, as
at other meals in the twenty years preceding his death, no wine. After
dinner he slept an hour; he then superintended experiments, read or
prepared his lectures, and made, usually by means of an amanuensis,
records of the day's dissections. "I never could understand," says W.
Clift, "how Mr Hunter obtained rest: when I left him at midnight, it
was with a lamp fresh trimmed for further study, and with the usual
appointment to meet him again at six in the morning." H. Leigh Thomas
records[27] that, on his first arrival in London, having by desire
called on Hunter at five o'clock in the morning, he found him already
busily engaged in the dissection of insects. Rigidly economical of
time, Hunter was always at work, and he had always in view some fresh
enterprise. To his museum he gave a very large share of his attention,
being fearful lest the ordering of it should be incomplete at his
death, and knowing of none who could continue his work for him. "When
I am dead," said he one day to Dr Maxwell Garthshore, "you will not
soon meet with another John Hunter." At the time of his death he had
anatomized over 500 different species of animals, some of them
repeatedly, and had made numerous dissections of plants. The
manuscript works by him, appropriated and destroyed by Home, among
which were his eighty-six surgical lectures, all in full, are stated
to have been "literally a cartload"; and many pages of his records
were written by Clift under his directions "at least half a dozen
times over, with corrections and transpositions almost without end."

To the kindness of his disposition, his fondness for animals, his
aversion to operations, his thoughtful and self-sacrificing attention
to his patients, and especially his zeal to help forward struggling
practitioners and others in any want abundantly testify. Pecuniary
means he valued no further than they enabled him to promote his
researches; and to the poor, to non-beneficed clergymen, professional
authors and artists his services were rendered without remuneration.
His yearly income in 1763-1774 was never L1000; it exceeded that sum
in 1778, for several years before his death was L5000, and at the time
of that event had reached above L6000. All his earnings not required
for domestic expenses were, during the last ten years of his life,
devoted to the improvement of his museum; and his property, this
excepted, was found on his decease to be barely sufficient to pay his
debts. By his contemporaries generally Hunter was respected as a
master of the art and science of anatomy, and as a cautious and
trustworthy if not an elegant or very dexterous operator. Few,
however, perceived the drift of his biological researches. Although it
was admitted, even by Jesse Foot,[28] that the idea after which his
unique museum had been formed--namely, that of morphology as the only
true basis of a systematic zoological classification--was entirely his
own, yet his investigations into the structure of the lower orders of
animals were regarded as works of unprofitable curiosity. One surgeon,
of no inconsiderable repute, is said to have ventured the remark that
Hunter's preparations were "just as valuable as so many pig's
pettitoes";[29] and the president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph
Banks, writing in 1796, plainly expressed his disbelief as to the
collection being "an object of importance to the general study of
natural history, or indeed to any branch of science except to that of
medicine." It was "without the solace of sympathy or encouragement of
approbation, without collateral assistance,"[30] and careless of
achieving fame--for he held that "no man ever was a great man who
wanted to be one"--that Hunter laboured to perfect his designs, and
established the science of comparative anatomy, and principles which,
however neglected in his lifetime, became the ground-work of all
medical study and teaching.

In accordance with the directions given by Hunter in his will, his
collection was offered for purchase to the British government. But the
prime minister, Pitt, on being asked to consider the matter,
exclaimed: "What! buy preparations! Why, I have not money enough to
purchase gunpowder." He, however, consented to the bestowal of a
portion of the king's bounty for a couple of years on Mrs Hunter and
her two surviving children. In 1796 Lord Auckland undertook to urge
upon the government the advisability of acquiring the collection, and
on the 13th of June 1799, parliament voted L15,000 for this purpose.
Its custodianship, after refusal by the College of Physicians, was
unanimously accepted by the Corporation of Surgeons on the terms
proposed. These were in brief--that the collection be open four hours
in the forenoon, two days every week, for the inspection and
consultation of the fellows of the College of Physicians, the members
of the Company of Surgeons and persons properly introduced by them, a
catalogue of the preparations and an official to explain it being at
those times always at hand; that a course of not less than twenty-four
lectures[31] on comparative anatomy and other subjects illustrated by
the collection be given every year by some member of the Company; and
that the preparations be kept in good preservation at the expense of
the Corporation, and be subject to the superintendence of a board of
sixteen trustees.[32] The fulfilment of these conditions was rendered
possible by the receipt of fees for examinations and diplomas, under
the charter by which, in 1800, the Corporation was constituted the
Royal College of Surgeons. In 1806 the collection was placed in
temporary quarters in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the sum of L15,000 was
voted by parliament for the erection of a proper and commodious
building for its preservation and extension. This was followed by a
grant of L12,500 in 1807. The collection was removed in 1812 to the
new museum, and opened to visitors in 1813. The greater part of the
present edifice was built in 1835, at an expense to the college of
about L40,000; and the combined Hunterian and collegiate collections,
having been rearranged in what are now termed the western and middle
museums, were in 1836 made accessible to the public. The erection of
the eastern museum in 1852, on premises in Portugal Street, bought in
1847 for L16,000, cost L25,000, of which parliament granted L15,000;
it was opened in 1855.

The scope of Hunter's labours may be defined as the explication of the
various phases of life exhibited in organized structures, both animal
and vegetable, from the simplest to the most highly differentiated. By
him, therefore, comparative anatomy was employed, not in subservience
to the classification of living forms, as by Cuvier, but as a means of
gaining insight into the principle animating and producing these
forms, by virtue of which he perceived that, however different in form
and faculty, they were all allied to himself. In what does life
consist? is a question which in his writings he frequently considers,
and which seems to have been ever present in his mind. Life, he
taught, was a principle independent of structure,[33] most tenaciously
held by the least highly organized beings, but capable of readier
destruction as a whole, as, e.g., by deprivation of heat or by pain,
in young than in old animals. In life he beheld an agency working
under the control of law, and exercising its functions in various
modes and degrees. He perceived it, as Abernethy observes, to be "a
great chemist," a power capable of manufacturing a variety of
substances into one kind of generally distributed nutriment, and of
furnishing from this a still greater variety of dissimilar substances.
Like Harvey, who terms it the _anima vegetiva_, he regarded it as a
principle of self-preservation, which keeps the body from dissolution.
Life is shown, said he, in renovation and action; but, although
facilitated in its working by mechanical causes, it can exist without
action, as in an egg new-laid or undergoing incubation. It is not
simply a regulator of temperature; it is a principle which resists
cold, conferring on the structures which it endows the capacity of
passing some degrees below the freezing-point of ordinary inanimate
matter without suffering congelation. Hunter found, in short, that
there exists in animals a latent heat of life, set free in the process
of death (see _Treatise on the Blood_, p. 80). Thus he observed that
sap if removed from trees froze at 32 deg. F., but within them might
be fluid even at 15 deg.; that a living snail placed in a freezing
mixture acquired first a temperature of 28 deg., and afterwards of 32
deg. ere it froze; and that, whereas a dead egg congealed immediately
at 32 deg., a living egg did so only when its temperature had risen to
that point after a previous fall to 29(1/4) deg. The idea that the
fluid and semifluid as well as the solid constituents of the body
contain the vital principle diffused through them he formed in
1755-1756, when, in making drawings illustrative of the changes that
take place in the incubated egg, he noted specially that neither the
white nor the yolk undergoes putrefaction. The blood he, with Harvey,
considered to possess a vitality of its own, more or less independent
of that of the animal in which it circulates. Life, he held, is
preserved by the compound of the living body and the source of its
solid constituents, the living blood. It is to the susceptibility of
the latter to be converted into living organized tissue that the union
of severed structures by the first intention is due. He even inclined
to the belief that the chyle has life, and he considered that food
becomes "animalized" in digestion. Coagulation of the blood he
compared to the contraction of muscles, and believed to be an
operation of life distinct from chemical coagulation, adducing in
support of his opinion the fact that, in animals killed by lightning,
by violent blows on the stomach, or by the exhaustion of hunting, it
does not take place. "Breathing," said Hunter, "seems to render life
to the blood, and the blood continues it in every part of the
body."[34] Life, he held, could be regarded as a fire, or something
similar, and might for distinction's sake be called "animal fire." Of
this the process of respiration might afford a constant supply, the
fixed life supplied to the body in the food being set free and
rendered active in the lungs, whilst the air carried off that
principle which encloses and retains the animal fire.[35] The living
principle, said Hunter, is coeval with the existence of animal or
vegetable matter itself, and may long exist without sensation. The
principle upon which depends the power of sensation regulates all our
external actions, as the principle of life does our internal, and the
two act mutually on each other in consequence of changes produced in
the brain. Something (the "materia vitae diffusa") similar to the
components of the brain (the "materia vitae coacervata") may be
supposed to be diffused through the body and even contained in the
blood; between these a communication is kept up by the nerves (the
"chordae internunciae").[36] Neither a material nor a chemical theory
of life, however, formed a part of Hunter's creed. "Mere composition
of matter," he remarked, "does not give life; for the dead body has
all the composition it ever had; life is a property we do not
understand; we can only see the necessary leading steps towards
it."[37] As from life only, said he in one of his lectures, we can
gain an idea of death, so from death only we gain an idea of life.
Life, being an agency leading to, but not consisting of, any
modification of matter, "either is something superadded to matter, or
else consists in a peculiar arrangement of certain fine particles of
matter, which being thus disposed acquire the properties of life." As
a bar of iron may gain magnetic virtue by being placed for a time in a
special position, so perhaps the particles of matter arranged and long
continued in a certain posture eventually gain the power of life. "I
enquired of Mr Hunter," writes one of his pupils,[38] "if this did not
make for the Exploded Doctrine of Equivocal Generation: he told me
perhaps it did, and that as to Equivocal Generation all we c^d have
was negative Proofs of its not taking Place. He did not deny that
Equivocal Generation happened; there were neither positive proofs for
nor against its taking place."

To exemplify the differences between organic and inorganic growth,
Hunter made and employed in his lectures a collection of crystallized
specimens of minerals, or, as he termed them, "natural or native
fossils." Of fossils, designated by him "extraneous fossils," because
extraneous respecting the rocks in which they occur, he recognized the
true nature, and he arranged them according to a system agreeing with
that adopted for recent organisms. The study of fossils enabled him to
apply his knowledge of the relations of the phenomena of life to
conditions, as exhibited in times present, to the elucidation of the
history of the earth in geological epochs. He observed the
non-occurrence of fossils in granite, but with his customary
scientific caution and insight could perceive no reason for supposing
it to be the original matter of the globe, prior to vegetable or
animal, or that its formation was different from that of other rocks.
In water he recognized the chief agent in producing terrestrial
changes (cf. _Treatise on the Blood_, p. 15, note); but the popular
notion that the Noachian deluge might account for the marine organisms
discovered on land he pointed out was untenable. From the diversity of
the situations in which many fossils and allied living structures are
found, he was led to infer that at various periods not only repeated
oscillations of the level of the land, lasting thousands of centuries,
but also great climatic variations, perhaps due to a change in the
ecliptic, had taken place in geological times. Hunter considered that
very few fossils of those that resemble recent forms are identical
with them. He conceived that the latter might be varieties, but that
if they are really different species, then "we must suppose that a new
creation must have taken place." It would appear, therefore, that the
origin of species in variation had not struck him as possible. That he
believed varieties to have resulted from the influence of changes in
the conditions of life in times past is shown by a somewhat obscure
passage in his "Introduction to Natural History" (_Essays and
Observations_, i. 4), in which he remarks, "But, I think, we have
reason to suppose that there was a period of time in which every
species of natural production was the same, there being then no
variety in any species," and adds that "civilization has made
varieties in many species, which are the domesticated." Modern
discoveries and doctrines as to the succession of life in time are
again foreshadowed by him in the observation in his introduction to
the description of drawings relative in incubation (quoted in Pref. to
_Cat. of Phys. Ser._ i. p. iv., 1833) that: "If we were capable of
following the progress of increase of the number of the parts of the
most perfect animal, as they first formed in succession, from the very
first, to its state of full perfection, we should probably be able to
compare it with some one of the incomplete animals themselves, of
every order of animals in the creation, being at no stage different
from some of those inferior orders; or, in other words, if we were to
take a series of animals from the more imperfect to the perfect, we
should probably find an imperfect animal corresponding with some stage
of the most perfect."

In pathological phenomena Hunter discerned the results of the
perturbation of those laws of life by which the healthy organism
subsists. With him pathology was a science of vital dynamics. He
afforded principles bearing not on single complaints only, but on the
effects of injury and disease in general. To attempt to set forth what
in Hunter's teaching was new to pathology and systematic surgery, or
was rendered so by his mode of treatment, would be well-nigh to
present an epitome of all that he wrote on those subjects. "When we
make a discovery in pathology," says Adams, writing in 1818, "we only
learn what we have overlooked in his writings or forgotten in his
lectures." Surgery, which only in 1745 had formally ceased to be
associated with "the art and mystery of barbers," he raised to the
rank of a scientific profession. His doctrines were, necessarily, not
those of his age: while lesser minds around him were still dim with
the mists of the ignorance and dogmatism of times past, his lofty
intellect was illumined by the dawn of a distant day.

AUTHORITIES.--See, besides the above quoted publications, _An Appeal
to the present Parliament ... on the subject of the late J. Hunter's
Museum_ (1795); Sir C. Bell, _A Lecture ... being a Commentary on Mr
J. Hunter s preparations of the Diseases of the Urethra_ (1830); The
President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, _Address to the
Committee for the Erection of a Statue of Hunter_ (Lond., March 29,
1859); Sir R. Owen, "Sketch of Hunter's Scientific Character and
Works," in Tom Taylor's _Leicester Square_ (1874), also in Hunter's
Works, ed. by Palmer, vol. iv. (1837), and in _Essays and
Observations_; the invaluable catalogues of the Hunterian Collection
issued by the Royal College of Surgeons; and numerous Hunterian
Orations. In the _Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales_, by John
White, is a paper containing directions for preserving animals,
printed separately in 1809, besides six zoological descriptions by
Hunter; and in the _Natural History of Aleppo_, by A. Russell, are
remarks of Hunter's on the anatomy of the jerboa and the camel's
stomach. Notes of his lectures on surgery, edited by J. W. K.
Parkinson, appeared in 1833 under the title of _Hunterian
Reminiscences_. Hunter's _Observations and Reflections on Geology_,
intended to serve as an introduction to the catalogue of his
collection of extraneous fossils, was published in 1859, and his
_Memoranda on Vegetation_ in 1860. (F. H. B.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The date is thus entered in the parish register, see Joseph
Adams, _Memoirs_, Appendix, p. 203. The Hunterian Oration, instituted
in 1813 by Dr Matthew Baillie and Sir Everard Home, is delivered at
the Royal College of Surgeons on the 14th of February, which Hunter
used to give as the anniversary of his birth.

[2] Ottley's date, 1738, is inaccurate, see S. F. Simmons, _Account
of ... W. Hunter_, p. 7. Hunter's mother died on the 3rd of November
1751, aged 66.

[3] So in Home's _Life_, p. xvi., and Ottley's, p. 15. Hunter himself
(_Treatise on the Blood_, p. 62) mentions the date 1755.

[4] Ottley incorrectly gives 1753 as the date. In the buttery book
for 1755 at St Mary's Hall his admission is thus noted: "Die Junii
5^to 1755 Admissus est Johannes Hunter superioris ordinis
Commensalis." Hunter apparently left Oxford after less than two
months' residence, as the last entry in the buttery book with charges
for battels against his name is on July 25, 1755. His name was,
however, retained on the books of the Hall till December 10, 1756.
The record of Hunter's matriculation runs: "Ter deg. Trin.
1755.--Junii 5^to Aul. S. Mar. Johannes Hunter 24 Johannis de
Kilbride in Com. Clidesdale Scotiae Arm. fil."

[5] Ottley, _Life of J. Hunter_, p. 22.

[6] _Treatise on the Blood_, p. 21.

[7] See Adams, _Memoirs_, pp. 32, 33. Cf. Hunter's _Treatise on the
Blood_, p. 8, and _Works_, ed. Palmer, i. 604.--On the employment of
Hunter's term "increased action" with respect to inflammation, see
Sir James Paget, _Lect. on Surg. Path._, 3rd ed., p. 321 sqq.

[8] According to Hunter, as quoted in Palmer's edition of his
lectures, p. 437, the accident was "after dancing, and after a
violent fit of the cramp"; W. Clift, however, who says he probably
never danced, believed that he met with the accident "in getting up
from the dissecting table after being cramped by long sitting" (see
W. Lawrence, _Hunt. Orat._, 1834, p. 64).

[9] The subjects and dates of his subsequent papers in the
_Transactions_, the titles of which give little notion of the
richness of their contents, are as follows: The torpedo (1773);
air-receptacles in birds, and the Gillaroo trout (1774); the
_Gymnotus electricus_, and the production of heat by animals and
vegetables (supplemented in 1777), (1775); the recovery of people
apparently drowned (1776); the free martin (1779); the communication
of smallpox to the foetus in utero, and the occurrence of male
plumage in old hen pheasants (1780); the organ of hearing in fishes
(1782); the anatomy of a "new marine animal" described by Home
(1785); the specific identity of the wolf, jackal and dog
(supplemented in 1789), the effect on fertility of extirpation of one
ovarium, and the structure and economy of whales (1787); observations
on bees (1793); and some remarkable caves in Bayreuth and fossil
bones found therein (1794). With these may be included a paper by
Home, from materials supplied by Hunter, on certain horny
excrescences of the human body.

[10] Mrs Hunter died on the 7th of January 1821, in Holles Street,
Cavendish Square, London, in her seventy-ninth year. She was a
handsome and accomplished woman, and well fulfilled the social duties
of her position. The words for Haydn's English canzonets were
supplied by her, and were mostly original poems; of these the lines
beginning "My mother bids me bind my hair" are, from the beauty of
the accompanying music, among the best known. (See R. Nares in _Gent.
Mag._ xci. pt. 1, p. 89, quoted in Nichols's _Lit. Anec._, 2nd ser.,
vii. 638.)

[11] _Hunt. Orat._, 1842, p. 15.

[12] The condition of this animal during hibernation was a subject of
special interest to Hunter, who thus introduces it, even in a letter
of condolence to Jenner in 1778 on a disappointment in love: "But let
her go, never mind her. I shall employ you with hedgehogs, for I do
not know how far I may trust mine."

[13] See his evidence at the trial of Captain Donellan, _Works_, i.
195.

[14] On the discovery of the dyeing of bones by madder, see Belchier,
Phil. Trans., vol. xxxix., 1736, pp. 287 and 299.

[15] _Essays and Observations_, i. 55, 56. "May we not claim for
him," says Sir Wm. Fergusson, with reference to these experiments,
"that he anticipated by a hundred years the scientific data on which
the present system of human grafting is conducted?" (_Hunt. Orat._,
1871, p. 17).

[16] _Essays and Observations_, i. 115; cf. _Works_, i. 391.

[17] The _Transactions_ of the Society contain papers by Hunter on
inflammation of veins (1784), intussusception (1789), a case of
paralysis of the muscles of deglutition (1790), and a case of
poisoning during pregnancy (1794), with others written by Home, from
materials supplied by him, on Hunter's operation for the cure of
popliteal aneurism, on loose cartilages in joints, on certain horny
excrescences of the human body, and on the growth of bones.

[18] Bell lived with Hunter fourteen years, i.e. from 1775 to 1789,
and was employed by him chiefly in making and drawing anatomical
preparations for the museum. He died in 1792 at Sumatra, where he was
assistant-surgeon to the East India Company.

[19] O'Brien, dreading dissection by Hunter, had shortly before his
death arranged with several of his countrymen that his corpse should
be conveyed by them to the sea, and sunk in deep water; but his
undertaker, who had entered into a pecuniary compact with the great
anatomist, managed that while the escort was drinking at a certain
stage on the march seawards, the coffin should be locked up in a
barn. There some men he had concealed speedily substituted an
equivalent weight of paving-stones for the body, which was at night
forwarded to Hunter, and by him taken in his carriage to Earl's
Court, and, to avoid risk of a discovery, immediately after suitable
division boiled to obtain the bones. See Tom Taylor, _Leicester
Square_, ch. xiv. (1874); cf. _Annual Register_, xxvi. 209 (1783).

[20] See C. R. Leslie and Tom Taylor, _Life and Times of Sir J.
Reynolds_, ii. 474 (1865).

[21] _Works_, i. 265-266.

[22] A transcript of a portion of Hunter's MSS., made by Clift in
1793 and 1800, was edited by Sir Richard Owen, in two volumes with
notes, in 1861, under the title of _Essays and Observations in
Natural History, Anatomy, Physiology, Psychology and Geology_. On the
destruction of Hunter's papers see Clift's "Appendix" in vol. ii. p.
497, also W. H. Flower, _Introd. Lect._, pp. 7-9 (1870).

[23] In his _Treatise on the Blood_, p. 288, Hunter observes: "We
find it a common principle in the animal machine, that every part
increases in some degree according to the action required. Thus we
find ... vessels become larger in proportion to the necessity of
supply, as for instance, in the gravid uterus; the external carotids
in the stag, also, when his horns are growing, are much larger than
at any other time."

[24] See Sir R. Owen, "John Hunter and Vivisection," _Brit. Med.
Journ._ (February 22, 1879, p. 284). In the fourth of his operations
for popliteal aneurism, Hunter for the first time did not include the
vein in the ligature. His patient lived for fifty years afterwards.
The results on the artery of this operation are to be seen in
specimen 347^(2A) (Path. Ser.) in the Hunterian Museum.

[25] Home, _Trans. of Soc. for Impr. of Med. and Chirurg. Knowl._ i.
147 (1793). Excess of heat in the injured limb was noticed also in
Hunter's second case on the day after the operation; and in his
fourth case it reached 4 deg.-5 deg. on the first day, and continued
during a fortnight.

[26] The record of Hunter's death in the _St James Chronicle_ for
October 15-17, 1793, p. 4, col. 4, makes no allusion to the immediate
cause of Hunter's death, but gives the following statement: "JOHN
HUNTER.--This eminent Surgeon and valuable man was suddenly taken
ill, yesterday, in the Council-room of St George's Hospital. After
receiving the assistance which could be afforded by two Physicians
and a Surgeon, he was removed in a close chair to his house, in
Leicester Fields, where he expired about two o'clock." Examination of
the heart revealed disease involving the pericardium, endocardium and
arteries, the coronary arteries in particular showing ossific change.

[27] _Hunt. Orat._, 1827, p. 5.

[28] See p. 266 of his malicious so-called _Life of John Hunter_
(1794).

[29] Cf. J. H. Green, _Hunt. Orat._, 1840, p. 27.

[30] Abernethy, _Physiological Lectures_, p. 11 (1817).

[31] Instituted in 1806.

[32] Increased to seventeen in 1856.

[33] How clearly he held this view is seen in his remark (_Treatise
on the Blood_, p. 28, cf. p. 46) that, as the coagulating lymph of
the blood is probably common to all animals, whereas the red
corpuscles are not, we must suppose the lymph to be the essential
part of that fluid. Hunter was the first to discover that the blood
of the embryos of red-blooded animals is at first colourless,
resembling that of invertebrates. (See Owen, Preface to vol. iv. of
_Works_, p. xiii.)

[34] _Treatise on the Blood_, p. 63.

[35] _Essays and Observations_, i. 113.

[36] _Treatise on the Blood_, p. 89.

[37] _Ib._ p. 90.

[38] P. P. Staple, with the loan of whose volume of MS. notes of
Hunter's "Chirurgical Lectures," dated, on the last page, Sept. 20th,
1787, the writer was favoured by Sir W. H. Broadbent.

HUNTER, ROBERT MERCER TALIAFERRO (1809-1887), American statesman, was born in Essex county, Virginia, on the 21st of April 1809. He entered the university of Virginia in his seventeenth year and was one of its first graduates; he then studied law at the Winchester (Va.) Law School, and in 1830 was admitted to the bar. From 1835 to 1837 he was a member of the Virginia house of delegates; from 1837 to 1843 and from 1845 to 1847 was a member of the national house of representatives, being Speaker from 1839 to 1841; and from 1847 to 1861 he was in the senate, where he was chairman of the finance committee (1850-1861). He is credited with having brought about a reduction of the quantity of silver in the smaller coins; he was the author of the Tariff Act of 1857 and of the bonded-warehouse system, and was one of the first to advocate civil service reform. In 1853 he declined President Fillmore's offer to make him secretary of state. At the National Democratic Convention at Charleston, S.C., in 1860 he was the Virginia delegation's choice as candidate for the presidency of the United States, but was defeated for the nomination by Stephen A. Douglas. Hunter did not regard Lincoln's election as being of itself a sufficient cause for secession, and on the 11th of January 1861 he proposed an elaborate but impracticable scheme for the adjustment of differences between the North and the South, but when this and several other efforts to the same end had failed he quietly urged his own state to pass the ordinance of secession. From 1861 to 1862 he was secretary of state in the Southern Confederacy; and from 1862 to 1865 was a member of the Confederate senate, in which he was, at times, a caustic critic of the Davis administration. He was one of the commissioners to treat at the Hampton Roads Conference in 1865 (see LINCOLN, ABRAHAM), and after the surrender of General Lee was summoned by President Lincoln to Richmond to confer regarding the restoration of Virginia in the Union. From 1874 to 1880 he was treasurer of Virginia, and from 1885 until his death near Lloyds, Virginia, on the 18th of July 1887, was collector of the Port of Tappahannock, Virginia.

See Martha T. Hunter, _A Memoir of Robert M. T. Hunter_ (Washington,
1903) for his private life, and D. R. Anderson, _Robert Mercer
Taliaferro Hunter_, in the John P. Branch Historical Papers of
Randolph Macon College (vol. ii. No. 2, 1906), for his public career.

HUNTER, WILLIAM (1718-1783), British physiologist and physician, the first great teacher of anatomy in England, was born on the 23rd of May 1718, at East Kilbride, Lanark. He was the seventh child of his parents, and an elder brother of the still more famous John Hunter (q.v.). When fourteen years of age, he was sent to the university of Glasgow, where he studied for five years. He had originally been intended for the church, but, scruples concerning subscription arising in his mind, he followed the advice of his friend William Cullen, and resolved to devote himself to physic. During 1737-1740 he resided with Cullen at Hamilton, and then, to increase his medical knowledge before settling in partnership with his friend, he spent the winter of 1740-1741 at Edinburgh. Thence he went to London, where Dr James Douglas (1675-1742), an anatomist and obstetrician of some note, to whom he had been recommended, engaged his services as a tutor to his son and as a dissector, and assisted him to enter as a surgeon's pupil at St George's Hospital and to procure the instruction of the anatomist Frank Nicholls (1699-1778). When Dr Douglas died Hunter still continued to live with his family. In 1746 he undertook, in place of Samuel Sharp, the delivery, for a society of naval practitioners, of a series of lectures on operative surgery, so satisfactorily that he was requested to include anatomy in his course. It was not long before he attained considerable fame as a lecturer; for not only was his oratorical ability great, but he differed from his contemporaries in the fullness and thoroughness of his teaching, and in the care which he took to provide the best possible practical illustrations of his discourses. We read that the syllabus of Edward Nourse (1701-1761), published in 1748, _totam rem anatomicam complectens_, comprised only twenty-three lectures, exclusive of a short and defective "Syllabus Chirurgicus," and that at "one of the most reputable courses of anatomy in Europe," which Hunter had himself attended, the professor was obliged to demonstrate all the parts of the body, except the nerves and vessels (shown in a foetus) and the bones, on a single dead subject, and for the explanation of the operations of surgery used a dog! In 1747 Hunter became a member of the Corporation of Surgeons. In the course of a tour through Holland to Paris with his pupil, J. Douglas, in 1728, he visited Albinus at Leiden, and inspected with admiration his injected preparations. By degrees Hunter renounced surgical for obstetric practice, in which he excelled. He was appointed a surgeon-accoucheur at the Middlesex Hospital in 1748, and at the British Lying-in Hospital in the year following. The degree of M.D. was conferred upon him by the university of Glasgow on the 24th of October 1750. About the same time he left his old abode at Mrs Douglas's, and settled as a physician in Jermyn Street. He became a licentiate of the College of Physicians on the 30th of September 1756. In 1762 he was consulted by Queen Charlotte, and in 1764 was made physician-extraordinary to her Majesty.

On the departure of his brother John for the army, Hunter engaged as an assistant William Hewson (1739-1774), whom he subsequently admitted to partnership in his lectures. Hewson was succeeded in 1770 by W. C. Cruikshank (1745-1800). Hunter was elected F.R.S. in 1767; F.S.A. in 1768, and third professor of anatomy to the Royal Academy of Arts; and in 1780 and 1782 respectively an associate of the Royal Medical Society and of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris. During the closing ten years of his life his health failed greatly. His last lecture, at the conclusion of which he fainted, was given, contrary to the remonstrances of friends, only a few days before his death, which took place in London on the 30th of March 1783. He was buried in the rector's vault at St James's, Piccadilly.

Hunter had in 1765 requested of the prime minister, George Grenville, the grant of a plot of ground on which he might establish "a museum in London for the improvement of anatomy, surgery, and physics" (see "Papers" at end of his _Two Introductory Lectures_, 1784), and had offered to expend on its erection L7000, and to endow in perpetuity a professorship of anatomy in connexion with it. His application receiving no recognition, he after many months abandoned his scheme, and built himself a house, with lecture and dissecting-rooms, in Great Windmill Street, whither he removed in 1770. In one fine apartment in this house was accommodated his collection, comprising anatomical and pathological preparations, ancient coins and medals, minerals, shells and corals. His natural history specimens were in part a purchase, for L1200, of the executors of his friend, Dr John Fothergill (1712-1780). Hunter's whole collection, together with his fine library of Greek and Latin classics, and an endowment of L8000, by his will became, after the lapse of twenty years, the property of the university of Glasgow.

Hunter was never married, and was a man of frugal habits. Like his brother John, he was an early riser, and a man of untiring industry. He is described as being in his lectures, which were of two hours' duration, "both simple and profound, minute in demonstration, and yet the reverse of dry and tedious"; and his mode of introducing anecdotal illustrations of his topic was most happy. Lecturing was to him a pleasure, and, notwithstanding his many professional distractions, he regularly continued it, because, as he said, he "conceived that a man may do infinitely more good to the public by teaching his art than by practising it" (see "Memorial" appended to _Introd. Lect._ p. 120).

Hunter was the author of several contributions to the _Medical
Observations and Enquiries_ and the _Philosophical Transactions_. In
his paper on the structure of cartilages and joints, published in the
latter in 1743, he anticipated what M. F. X. Bichat sixty years
afterwards wrote concerning the structure and arrangement of the
synovial membranes. His _Medical Commentaries_ (pt. i., 1762,
supplemented 1764) contains, among other like matter, details of his
disputes with the Monros as to who first had successfully performed
the injection of the _tubuli testis_ (in which, however, both he and
they had been forestalled by A. von Haller in 1745), and as to who had
discovered the true office of the lymphatics, and also a discussion on
the question whether he or Percivall Pott ought to be considered the
earliest to have elucidated the nature of _hernia congenita_, which,
as a matter of fact, had been previously explained by Haller. In the
_Commentaries_ is exhibited Hunter's one weakness--an inordinate love
of controversy. His impatience of contradiction he averred to be a
characteristic of anatomists, in whom he once jocularly condoned it,
on the plea that "the passive submission of dead bodies" rendered the
crossing of their will the less bearable. His great work, _The Anatomy
of the Gravid Uterus, exhibited in Figures_, fol., was published in
1774. His posthumous works are _Two Introductory Lectures_ (1784), and
_Anatomical Description of the Human Gravid Uterus_ (1794), which was
re-edited by Dr E. Rigby in 1843.

See _Gent. Mag._ liii. pt. 1, p. 364 (1783); S. F. Simmons, _An
Account of the Life of W. Hunter_ (1783); Adams's and Ottley's Lives
of J. Hunter; Sir B. C. Brodie, _Hunterian Oration_ (1837); W. Munk,
_The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London_, ii. 205
(1878). (F. H. B.)