Nature [February 11, 1928

210 NATURE [FEBRUARY 11, 1928

The Bicentenary of John Hunter. By Sir ARTHUR KEITH, F.R.S. ONSIDER for a moment the unenviable position to buy Hunter's museum for £15,000. The collec• C.) of John Hunter's two executors in the year tion was handed over to the Corporation of Surgeons 1793-his nephew Dr. Matthew Baillie and his in 1800; that body obtained at the same time a young brother-in-law, Mr. (later Sir) Everard Home. new charter, became the College of Surgeons, and Hunter's sudden death on Oct. 16, 1793, in his established itself and its museum on the south side sixty-sixth year, left, on their hands a huge estab• of Lincoln's Inn Fields-where both still flourish. lishment running The two ex• from Leicester ecutors continued Square to Charing to believe in Cross Road-just Hunter's great• to the south of ness, as may be the site now oc• seen from the fol• cupied by the lowing quotation Alhambra Music taken from the Hall. The income issue of the Col• of the establish• lege calendar for ment had sud• the present year : denly ceased; a "In the year sum of more than 1813, Dr. Matthew £10,000 a year was Baillie and Sir needed to keep it Eve rard Home, going. A brief Bart., executors of search showed John Hunter, 'be• them that the place ing desirous of was in debt ; bills showing a lasting mark of respect ' to had to be met. the memory of the Hunter's carriage late Mr. John 'blood-horses' and Hunter, gave to coach had to go ; the College the sum Mrs. Hunter, bril• of £1684 : 4 : 4, liant and fashion three per cent. Consolidated Bank able, had also to Annuities for the part with her endowment of an coachman, her annual oration, to c a r r i a g e, h e r be called the Hun• horses, and sedan terian oration, and chair. Pictures, to be delivered in books, furniture the theatre of the College on the 14th had to be sold to of February, the provide Mrs. Birthday of John Hunter and her Hunter, by the daughter with a Master, or one of modest shelter in the Governors for Brighton. The the time being, or weekly wage bill such other member of the Court of had to be reduced; Assistants as should the staff, number• be appointed-such ing more than a . oration to be ex- FIG. 1.-The statue of John Hunter, executed by Weekes and erected m the Royal . score, was reduced College of Surgeons, London, by public subscription in1858. press1ve of the at a stroke to one merits in Compara• -Mr. Hunter's young museum assistant, William tive Anatomy, Physiology, and Surgery, not only of Clift. John Hunter, but also of all such persons as should What was to be done with the Museum which be from time to time deceased, whose labours may have contributed to their improvement or extension." Hunter had erected in the yard or garden of his premises On this treasury he had lavished The first oration was given in 1814 by Sir Everard every sovereign he could earn or borrow, and Home ; last year it was delivered by the president every hour he could steal from practice, hospital, of the College, Sir Berkeley Moynihan ; this year Sir and sleep. It was the harvest of an intense life• Holburt Waring is Orator, and will take the oppor• time. After seven years of 'lobbying,' the two tunity of measuring the debt which modern sur• executors succeeded in persuading a government in gery owes to discoveries made by chemists and by search of money to wage successful war with France, physicists. Hunter's two executors were interested No. 3041, VoL. 121]

© 1928 Nature Publishing Group FEBRUARY 11, 1928] NATURE 211 parties; were they justified in launching on succeed• cultured in manner ; he had an eye on Court and ing generations this act of Hunter worship ? Is on the main chance ; he was a scholar, a brilliant Hunter's memory being kept alive by a species of teacher, kept himself closely in touch with the best 'artificial respiration' ? Many younger surgeons that was being thought and done in medical Europe, would return a frank affirmative; what Hunter and made observations for himself at first hand. thought and did, they hold, has no bearing on the In October 1748, William found his school in a surgical problem of the twentieth century. With prosperous state; his dissecting room was crowded; whom lies the truth ? With the executors, or the preparations which he had made and preserved with these modern critics ? to illustrate his lectures began to form an imposing Before seeking to measure our indebtedness to museum. His youngest brother, John, although Hunter, let us first inquire how a youth-the twenty years of age, was s.till idling at home ; he youngest of a family of ten, bred on a bleak upland had grown into a short, thick-set fellow, with farm some eight sandy hair and miles southward freckled face. of Glasgow, suc• William brought ceeded in estab• him to London and lishing himself in set him to work London as the lead• in the dissecting ing surgeon of his rooi:n. John took day. John Hun• to the life as a ter's career was de• duck takes to termined in 1736 ; water ; he had " Jockie," then a hands and could spoiled boy of use them ; he never eight, was running really cared for wild at home, while books ; he pre• his brother Wil• ferred to decipher liam, ten years his the hieroglyphics senior, had finished of life at first• with the Univer• hand ; he chose to sity of Glasgow and register his dis• was thinking of the coveriesin museum Church as a career. jars rather than It was in this year in printed pages. that a young prac• It was only when titioner- William he turned lecturer Cullen by name• that he was com• settledin theneigh• pelled to reduce his bourhood. In due o b s e r v a t i o n s, time he was to be• thoughts, and ex• come the great Dr. periments to Cullen and hold in words. He was medicine much the careless of dress, same position as unconventional in his contemporary manner, and un• Samuel Johnson compromising in held in literature, speech. An un• FIG. 2.-Portrait of John Hunter, from Sharp's engraving of the original picture but in the mean- painted by Sir J oshua Reynolds in 1788, when Hunter was sixty years of age. ceasing search into time we are con• the nature of life be• cerned with him merely as medical attendant on came his religion. He was resolved to win on merit; the Hunter family. He recognised William's and in the long run, sheer merit was victorious. ability; took him into his house as pupil-appren• Cullen launched William on the sea of medicine, and tice; put him in touch with the medical problems in due course William launched his brother John• of the time, and showed him how the leading minds now the subject of seventy-four H unterian Orations. of Europe were seeking to solve them. We are So I come back to my main question : What did indebted to Cullen for the medical Hunters. Hunter do for medicine that we should continue William Hunter's ambition was thus fired ; to be mindful of him ? Great men, as a rule, are in October 1740 he visited London and found a so easily labelled-Jenner, Hunter's pupil, dis• pretext for not returning to Scotland. There covered the efficacy of vaccination ; Charles Bell were great hospitals in London then, but no demonstrated the action of spinal nerves; Marshall medical schools were attached to them as is the Hall discovered reflex action ; Lister, antiseptic case now. Such schools as existed were in private surgery. In not one of these cases is the label hands. William established one in Covent Garden, adequate, but the public demands that its great men laying himself out for practice at the same time. must be ticketed. There is no tag for John Hunter; He was careful in dress, suave in speech, and to do him justice we must give him a hundred. No. 3041, VoL. 121]

© 1928 Nature Publishing Group 212 NATURE [FEBRUARY 11, 1928 It has been said that Hunter was the founder as represented by tissue culture, tumour grafting, of scientific surgery. If by this is meant that transplanting of living organs and parts-can fail surgery will become a science only when all the to see that after a century and a half we are again secrets of life have been revealed and mastered, returning to the Hunterian outlook and the then Hunter has a just right to such a title. For Hunterian methods of approach. the obsession of his life was the discovery of the Hunter's published works are contained in six mechanism of living matter; he perceived that volumes-the four volumes which are included life was the same in all its forms ; an organised in Palmer's edition (1837) and the two precious blood clot in a patient in St. George's Hospital volumes of "Essays and Observations " published was for him the same thing as the hydra which by Sir Richard Owen in 1861. A study of these he grew in his vivarium at Earl's Court. He volumes shows how dangerous it is to say wherein applied the same method of study to both. He Hunter was wrong or mistaken; he made many knew nothing of oxygen, oxidation, or of the grave errors of inference-none of observation. chemical nature of combustion, but he measured But in the majority of instances time has proved the ' amount of life ' by the ' vital ' heat generated, that it was n6t Hunter who was in the wrong, but using the most delicate thermometer obtainable, his editors. to give him a standard for comparison. He knew There is one aspect of Hunter's life which his nothing of those living units we now call cells annotators have refused to mention, or if they have or corpuscles ; he measured the processes of alluded to it, explained it as an aberration of a 'simple life' in the mass. He subjected it to all great mind. The truth is that Hunter's inquiries degrees of temperature and noted its reactions. had made him a pagan ; he could not harmonise In this way Hunter tried to get at the secrets what he found in the realms of Nature with what of that reaction of living matter which is called his inquiries revealed to his own eyes. He silently inflammation, He used his thermometer to tell and resolutely thought and wrote as if the book of him what was happening in the hibernating hedge• Genesis had never been in existence. The last paper hog, his beehives in winter, and the trees of his he ever penned was "Observations on the Fossil garden when frost was deep in the ground. He Bones presented to the Royal Society by His Most realised to the full that if we are to understand Serene Highness the Margrave of Anspach." In life we must first study growth, and that of all this paper the council of the Royal Society was the tissues of the animal body, bone was the one alarmed to find that Hunter, in order to explail]. which best lent itself to an exact inquiry. He certain changes, postulated "thousands of centuries," carried out an experimental study of the growth and ultimately succeeded in getting the estimate of bones, extending over many years, in fowls, reduced to thousands of years, thus bringing the pigs, asses, and deer ; he used the modern methods estimate within the limits of Biblical chronology. of vital staining and of experimental operation. He In the meantime Hunter died, and his brother-in• regarded antlers as bony tumours; he sought to law, Sir Everard Home, readily sanctioned the understand how Nature produced them and parti• desired change. Even Sir Richard Owen in 1861 cularly he desired to discover the secrets of the blood• is an apologist for Hunter's heretical beliefs. In less operation by which she removed them annu• the 'advertisement' to" Essays and Observations " ally-without fee. Living matter, by itself, had he wrote: mastered the art of healing ; if men were ever to " Some may wish that the world had never known become surgeons they must learn their art by study• that Hunter thought so differently on some subjects ing the surgical ways of living matter. That was from what they believed, and would have desired Hunter's message to his day and generation ; for him to think. But he has chosen to leave a record this reason he turned experimental embryologist, of his thoughts and, under the circumstances in which experimental botanist, experimental zoologist, that record has come into my hands, I have felt experimental physiologist, experimental patho• myself bound to add it to the common intellectual logist, and experimental surgeon. What he did proporty of mankind." and what he thought can never cease to be a There would have been no record left if Sir source of inspiration to those who inquire at first Everard Home had had his way. That any hand, for the problems he sought to solve are still record was preserved at all of Hunter's real thoughts those which envisage us-the basal problems of life. is due to Owen's father-in-law, William Clift. Why, then, do the younger surgeons of to-day Home burned Hunter's original manuscripts, the neglect Hunter or brush him aside as out-of-date 1 usual explanation being that he had pilfered from It is because of the unbounded success of Lister's them. A close study of the conventional character discovery ; the Listerian revolution has led them of Sir Everard Home and of the circumstances to concentrate their whole attention on the which surround this infamous act of vandalism have cleanliness of their wounds and the technique of convinced me that the accepted explanation is their operations. Their attention is occupied not the true one. Home shared implicitly in the with the organisms which may invade wounds and religious beliefs of his time and never doubted that they forget a fact ever present in Hunter's mind• by destroying all evidence of Hunter's heretical that the powers of healing are resident in the living convictions he -was performing an act of piety on flesh. No one who notes what is happening now behalf of the world in general and for the memory in the most progressive lines of biological inquiry• of his brother-in-law in particular. The world has experimental embryology and experimental biology, still much to learn from John Hunter. No. 3041, VoL. 121]