BIOMED 
 Hist Div 
 WZ 
 100 
 i H917H0 
 1893 
 
 l§ll!li0I^0RY iDiMSS 
 
 M:^5T, GEORGE'S HOSPITAL 
 
 ON THE 
 
 CENTENARY 
 
 JOHN HUNTER'S DEATH. 
 
 893. 
 
 T. HOLMES.
 
 
 I 
 
 kir 
 
 ^ 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 9m^ . 
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVEEED AT 
 
 ST. GEORGE'S HOSPITAL, OCTOBER 2, 1893, 
 
 CENTENARY OF JOHN HUNTER'S DEATH. 
 
 T. HOLMES, 
 
 CONSULTING SUEGEON AND HUNTEEIAN LECTUEEE ON CLINICAL SUEGEET. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 FEINTED BY ADLAED AND SON, 
 
 BARTHOLOMEW CLOSE, E.G., and 20, HANOVER SQUARE, W. 
 
 1893.
 
 Hist ^iv 
 
 WZ 
 loo 
 
 INTRODUCTOEY ADDEESS. 
 
 Gentlemen, 
 
 The honorable but very difficult task has 
 been imposed on me, by my old colleagues, of 
 welcoming the new students to the School to-day, 
 and of dehvering an Address on the Life and Works 
 of Hunter, in celebration of the Centenary of his 
 death, which took place almost exactly a century 
 ago within the walls of the Hospital. We trust 
 that the epoch will be marked in a more enduring 
 way by the erection of a worthy presentment of 
 the greatest of the many great sons of St. George's, 
 in the school of which he was the real Founder. 
 
 My difficulty does not lie in the first part of my 
 task. I can say, honestly, that in my judgment 
 you could not have chosen better than the old 
 school of Hunter. One conspicuous merit St. 
 George's has, I think, always had — its ample oppor- 
 tunities for clinical study. The teachers are, I 
 believe, as accomplished and zealous as are any-
 
 4 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 where to be found ; but all of you wlio are to do 
 any good in the profession will soon find out that — 
 
 " Others' follies teach us not, 
 
 Nor much their wisdom teaches, 
 
 And most of sterling worth is what 
 
 Our own experience preaches." * 
 
 If you are ever to learn, you must learn from your 
 own observations — from your own successes and 
 failures ; and certainly I sliall speak of my great 
 subject to-day to little purpose if I do not show 
 you that this was Hunter's way. He took no 
 doctrine for gospel, but tested all he heard by his 
 own independent observation. Try to do the same. 
 I believe there is no hospital in the world where 
 more liberal facilities are given for study in the 
 wards, or more efficient assistance to those who 
 will work for themselves. It was Hunter, as I 
 shall try to show you, who was foremost in secur- 
 ing adequate clinical teaching for our students. I 
 hope those whom I see before me will avail them- 
 selves of the fruit of his labours. 
 
 The changes in our School during the past year 
 have been fortunately in great part additions. 
 We have to regret, and we do regret most sincerely, 
 the expiration of the term of office of Mr. Carter, 
 whose brilliant talents as a lecturer and ophthalmic 
 surgeon have been appreciated by many generations 
 of students. We have a successor in Mr. Frost 
 whom we can trust to give that important branch 
 * Tennyson, " Will Waterproof's Monologue."
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 5 
 
 of pathology and surgery its proper share in the 
 education of the coming race. The inexorable law 
 of the hospital will, I fear, shortly deprive us of the 
 services of our Senior Physician ; but as yet I need 
 only allude to what all will feel as a grievous loss 
 to the hospital and School. Dr. Cavafy has taken 
 Dr. Dickinson's place as Joint Lecturer on Medi- 
 cine. The management of the School has been 
 changed by the appointment of Dr. Owen as Dean 
 in Dr. Whipham's place. We may hope that the 
 new officer will guide the School with the zeal and 
 success which was shown by his predecessor, and 
 for which we all give Dr. Whipham our heartiest 
 thanks — and we have a good omen that this will be 
 so in the share which Dr. Owen has taken in esta- 
 blishing the school of Anatomy and Physiology at 
 Cardiff and the University of Wales. I ought also 
 to mention that Mr. Ross has resigned the Demon- 
 stratorship of Anatomy, after long and most valu- 
 able services, and is succeeded by Mr. Grimsdale — 
 that Dr. Lee Dickinson has succeeded Dr. Rolleston 
 as Curator of the Museum, and is himself succeeded 
 by Dr. Cyril Ogle as Medical Registrar, and that 
 Mr. Ward has replaced Mr. Allingham as Surgical 
 Registrar, and is succeeded as Anaesthetist by 
 Dr. Davidson. 
 
 The additions to our staff afford matter for 
 unmixed congratulation. The appointment of a 
 third Assistant Physician and Surgeon having been 
 found necessary, the choice of the Governors fell on
 
 6 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 Dr. Rolleston, wlio lias himself done excellent ser- 
 vice to the Hospital, and is the son of a brilliant 
 scholar and physician too early lost to the profes- 
 sion, and on Mr. Marmaduke Sheild, a man already 
 distinguished in Surgery, and who is, I hope, not 
 less pleased to return to his old School than his old 
 friends are to see him back. 
 
 The most important change in the School, and 
 one which will greatly increase its clinical efficiency, 
 is the doubling of the number of House Physicians 
 and Surgeons and the new arrangement of their 
 duties. That double the number of students should 
 have the invaluable privilege of serving in these 
 offices is one of the most important practical ad- 
 vances made in my day, and for it we ought to give 
 our grateful acknowledgments to the unfailing liber- 
 ality of the Governors and their zeal for all that 
 conduces to the welfare of the patients, and (what 
 is much the same thing) the better education of the 
 students. Amongst appointments outside the 
 School Dr. Penrose has been appointed Examiner 
 in Pharmacology and Practical Pharmacy, and Dr. 
 Rolleston in Anatomy to the Conjoint Board. All 
 who know and honour one of the worthiest of St. 
 George's men will congratulate our old friend Dr. 
 Duka on his nomination to the important office of 
 President of the Tropical Section in the approach- 
 ing Hygienic Congress at Buda-Pesth. Dr. Duka 
 may be called our Ulysses — a man who after serving 
 through a glorious, though temporarily unsuccessful,
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 7 
 
 war experienced many wanderings and sufferings, 
 and who has made acquaintance with the cities and 
 the manners of men of many lands.* May his ripe 
 experience guide his colleagues to some wiser inter- 
 national policy of public hygiene at this momentous 
 juncture. 
 
 So far my task has been an easy and a grateful 
 one. But now I come to the difficult, nay the almost 
 impossible, attempt to give you in the time allotted 
 to my address an adequate idea of the character and 
 labours of the great man whose connection with it is 
 the chief glory of our School. 
 
 We claim Hunter as, in an especial sense, our own ; 
 for though it may be true that men so great as he 
 become the common property of the race, as Pericles 
 said that " Famous men have the whole earth for 
 their tomb,"* yet to have produced so great a 
 surgeon as Hunter is the special glory of English 
 surgery. And similarly his renown and his memory 
 are more peculiarly the individual glory of this 
 hospital, where he worked and where he died. Yes, 
 it is our peculiar glory, as it is our great responsi- 
 bility, to show ourselves not unworthy to follow in 
 his footsteps and sit in his chair. And as it has 
 pleased my colleagues to decorate me with the proud 
 title of " Hunterian Lecturer on Clinical Surgery " 
 in this School, I could not refuse when called upon 
 
 * "AvSpa TToXoTpoTTOv OQ nuXa iroWd UXdyxdil sTrti Tpo/?;e itpov 
 i7To\ii9pov iTTifxre TloWutv S avOpioTruv 'iSiv aaria /ca'i voov iyvu. 
 
 Horn., Od. i. 
 "f" 'AvSpdv tirKpavHv iraaa yi] rd(pog. — Thuc. ii, 43.
 
 8 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 by tliem to be the speaker, though when I think 
 how unequal I am to the task I must, indeed, call for 
 the indulgence of my colleagues and friends. Not 
 only is the subject so immense that it can only be 
 just touched on in the allotted time, but it has been 
 treated at the College of Surgeons now fifty-seven 
 times by the greatest surgeons and best orators of 
 their day, from the first Hunterian Oration in 1814, 
 by Sir E. Home, to Mr. Bryant's in the present year,* 
 so that anything like originality is impossible ; and 
 yet I do not quite despair of holding your attention. 
 In the lives and characters of these great men there 
 is something of the endless variety and freshness of 
 the nature whose interpreters they were. Their 
 story, therefore, however poorly told, cannot alto- 
 gether lack interest.! And to surgeons it can hardly 
 be otherwise than useful to meditate for a while on 
 the works of him who laid the foundation and erected 
 so much of the edifice of scientific surgery. Would 
 that that meditation might lead some of you to a 
 deeper study of works so interesting, so profound, so 
 suggestive ! For my younger hearers especially — 
 the students of Hunter's school — what better em- 
 ployment for the opening of their session than to 
 contemplate the great example, how success and 
 
 * The Hunterian Oration was founded by Sir E. Home and Dr. 
 Baillie, and was at first annual, from 1814 to 1834 inclusive ; it was 
 omitted in 1835 and 1836, resumed in 1837, and continued annually 
 till 1853, since which date it has been delivered every other year. — 
 See ' Ottley's Life,' p. 146. 
 
 t " His fame is fixed too high for us ever to grow careless or 
 weary of our theme." — Holden, ' Hunterian Oration.'
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 9 
 
 glory is reached in our profession, the example of a 
 man whose whole soul was given up to his science, 
 who cared nothing for rest, nothing for amusement, 
 nothing for money or rewards ; who passed a hard 
 life, chequered with sorrow and privation, embittered 
 by opposition, tormented by disease, and darkened 
 by the prospect of death coming with all his pro- 
 jects unfulfilled, yet a life passed in continual plea- 
 sure, the pleasure of thinking, in which he took 
 such delight, and the delightful occupation of build- 
 ing up his great museum and pursuing his endless 
 research into nature, an occupation to which he 
 willingly sacrificed money and leisure and health 
 and everything that lower natures covet ; or rather 
 did not so much sacrifice them as pass them by un- 
 noticed. The result is that now, a century after his 
 death, Hunter's fame is infinitely higher than it ever 
 was in his life. Like the great mountains, whose rela- 
 tive height you can hardly judge of till you are far 
 away, the distance of a century enables us to see how 
 far he overtops all other medical philosophers and 
 workers — that he was one of the very few men whose 
 life forms an era in the history of human knowledge. 
 I will not believe that such a story can be altogether 
 spoiled by any defects in the telling, especially be- 
 fore a St. George's audience. 
 
 My subject being defined for me as The Life 
 and Works of Hunter, I will take it in that order, 
 and speak first of his life. I must not spend your 
 time over facts which you probably know well, so
 
 10 INTRODUCTOEY ADDRESS. 
 
 shall merely say here that Hunter was born in 
 Lanarkshire in 1728, and lived at home or in 
 Glasgow till 1748, when he came to London to 
 help his brother William in his dissecting room, 
 intending if this did not suit him to join the army. 
 He was, however, most successful as his brother's 
 assistant, and soon afterwards determined to adopt 
 medicine or surgery as his profession ; began his 
 studies at Chelsea Hospital in 1749, and continued 
 them at St. Bartholomew's under Pott in 1751 ; 
 entered as a surgical pupil at St. George's in 1754, 
 and was House Surgeon here in 1756, but only for 
 five months.* He had for some time shared his 
 
 * When Hunter first came to London lie was engaged merely as 
 his brother's assistant, in preparing the dissections for his 
 anatomical lectures, in helping the students, and making pre- 
 parations for William Hunter's museum, and then, " during the 
 summer months," as Mr. Marshall says. '" and when not engaged 
 in the dissecting-room and the museum, he devoted his time and 
 thought to medicine and surgery, and finally resolved to pursue the 
 latter. Thus early in life he began what was quite an innovation, 
 to interweave pure scientific work with surgery, and so foresha- 
 dowed his future great destiny.' — Marshall, ' Hunterian Oration,' 
 p. 10. 
 
 Hunter's entrance into the profession was remarkably late. 
 There is no evidence that he had ever done anything in anatomy or 
 any of the allied sciences till he first came to London at the age of 
 twenty ; then he passed through an unusually protracted student 
 career — was house surgeon at St. Geor;;e's at the age of twenty- 
 eight, and even after this was absent from England with the army 
 for three years before commencing practice in London at the age of 
 thirty-five. 
 
 Holden, in his • Hunterian Oration,' tries to prove that Hunter 
 studied at the University of Glasgow in the class of Physical 
 Science. It seems evident, however, that the John Hunter whose 
 entry Mr. Holden discovered was a different person ; and yet few
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 11 
 
 brother's anatomical labours and continued to do so 
 after bis House Surgeoncy ; but in 1759 be was 
 attacked with pulmonary symptoms, of wbicb an 
 elder brotber bad died ; so be was recommended a 
 cbange of climate. He applied for a post in tbe 
 Army, was made Staff Surgeon, and went in 1761 
 to tbe Siege of Belle Isle and afterwards to tbe 
 Peninsula, returning in 1763, wben be settled in 
 London. He was elected F.R.S. in 1767 and 
 Surgeon to St. George's in 1768, and in 1772 
 married Anne, tbe sister of Sir E. Home. He rose 
 rapidly in public estimation, was made Deputy- 
 Surgeon General to tbe Army in 1786, and Surgeon 
 General in 1789 ; but is said by bis biographers to 
 bave been long in obtaining a lucrative practice. 
 Tbe later part of bis life, from 1773, was tormented 
 by illness, and be bad many severe fits of angina 
 pectoris before tbe one wbicb carried bim off. Tbis 
 was in a dispute at tbe hospital about tbe terms 
 on wbicb pupils were to be received. Something 
 said to him by one of bis colleagues produced a fit 
 of violent anger, in which be expired on October 
 16tb, 1793. 
 
 We have ample information about Hunter's life 
 from the early Hunterian orators who were bis 
 friends and pupils, from tbe sympathetic bio- 
 graphies of Home, Ottley, and others, and from 
 
 can read Mr. Holden's ' Hunterian Oration ' without admitting the 
 high probability that Hunter may have had some anatomical 
 instruction before joining his brother's dissecting-room, but there 
 is no proof of the fact.
 
 12 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 Jesse Foot's snarling, envious diatribe.* Putting 
 all this together, then, what does Hunter's life 
 come to ? 
 
 No doubt the first thing that strikes the student 
 is its immense laboriousness, at least in his later 
 years, for in his youth he seems to have been fond 
 of society and pleasure. But in his maturity and 
 age his day began with sunrise in the summer and 
 lonof before dawn at other seasons after about four 
 hours in bed, and from four or five in the morning 
 he used to dissect till eight o'clock breakfast. f 
 
 * " Quo fit ut omnis votivii pateat veluti descripta tabella vita 
 senis." — Hor. 
 
 t Mr. Thomas, in his ' Hunterian Oration,' 1827, says," Upon my 
 first arrival in London, on presenting a letter of introduction, lie 
 desired to see me at five the next morning ! I found him in his 
 museum busily engaged in the dissection of insects." Mr. Thomas 
 then relates how he became Hunter's dresser at St. George's, how 
 Hunter procured him employment as an assistant surgeon in Loi'd 
 Macartney's embassy to China, and how, on the homeward voyage, 
 " we fell in with a small merchant vessel on its course to New South 
 Wales. When the master came on board he was instantly assailed 
 on all sides with anxious inquiries for news from England. Almost 
 among the first public occurrences he mentioned was the sudden 
 death of John Hunter. That I should, in common with most 
 others who heai'd the account, deplore the loss which science had 
 sustained was most natural, and that I should individually lament 
 the death of one for whom I entertained such sentiments of grati- 
 tude and attachment ; but still I was much consoled, and felt a 
 proud satisfaction in heaving a plain unlettered seaman, in the 
 midst of the Pacific Ocean, pay such a tribute of unpremeditated 
 respect to the memory of departed genius and worth." 
 
 In reference to this anecdote Sir B. Brodie remarks, " When Mr. 
 Thomas visited him at five on an October morning, and found him 
 already busily engaged in dissecting an insect under the light of a 
 lamp, he was in that state in which any sudden and violent emotion 
 of the mind might have endangered his life." — 'Hunterian Oration,' 
 1837.
 
 Introductory address. 13 
 
 Then he saw his patients or pursued his researches 
 till he had to go his rounds to the hospital, or to 
 his oflSce of Surgeon General, or his patients in the 
 city, and after his frugal dinner at four o'clock and 
 an hour's sleep he resumed his labours or went to 
 some scientific meeting till midnight brought the 
 day to an end. This constant work and want of 
 sleep probably shortened his days, and was, in 
 Dr. E-idge's opinion,* the exciting cause of the 
 angina which carried him off. But I have no doubt 
 that this method of life was for him the happiest,t 
 for it kept him always thinking, and thinking was 
 the great joy of his life. He had other joys too. As 
 I said, in his younger days he seems to have been 
 fond of company, he had some taste for the fine 
 arts, I and so on; but as life wore on, and as he 
 saw plainly enough by repeated warnings that 
 it could not be a long one, with endless unsolved 
 questions ever rising in his mind, with his museum 
 ever growing and opening out into new vistas of 
 research as every fresh addition was made to it, and 
 with even his one great book — that on the Blood 
 
 * Ridge, J., ' Observations on the Life, Disease, and Death of 
 John Hunter,' 1855. 
 
 t " His whole life was a series of incessant labovir, or rather of 
 delightful occupation ; for it was spent in pursuits to which he was 
 devoted, heart and soul. The only i-elaxation was that afforded by 
 change of employment." — Lawrence, ' Hunterian Oration.' 
 
 J " Mr. Hunter was particularly fond of drawings and paintings. 
 There was no poor artist of talent in this town that he did not 
 befriend to the utmost of his powers." — Abernethy, ' Phys. Lect.,' 
 p. 192.
 
 14 INTRODtrOTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 and Inflammation — still unfinished after more than 
 thirty years of labour, and never to be finished 
 in his lifetime, his passion for research seems to 
 have "like Aaron's serpent swallowed all the 
 rest," and although he suff*ered so terribly from 
 angina that his friends feared each attack would 
 be his end, though he knew that " his life," as he 
 said, " was in the hands of any rascal who chose 
 to annoy and tease him," he held all this not 
 as a motive for giving up, but on the contrary for 
 working the harder as he saw the night approaching 
 when no man could work ; and I have read some- 
 where that on the very morning of his death he had 
 been as usual occupied for hours before breakfast 
 on a dissection which he finished much to his own 
 satisfaction. 
 
 I hope, then, we may say of the life of this great 
 man that on the whole it was a happy one, cheered 
 by the firm assurance that it had not been lived in 
 vain, that if he had not attained (as indeed no man 
 could attain) to his own ideal, yet he had succeeded 
 in what no man up to that time had even attempted, 
 viz. in uniting together natural philosophy, zoology, 
 physiology, pathology, and surgery, and teaching 
 the art to which ho devoted his mighty powers as a 
 branch of the general science of nature. But 
 though I think we are justified in regarding him as 
 a happy man, on the whole, we must allow that he 
 had great sorrows. Since he had his first fit of 
 gout at the ago of forty-one he was tortured by
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 15 
 
 constant ill health, which reacted on, and was no 
 doubt aggravated by, a temper which all his friends 
 allow to have been very irritable.* This disposi- 
 tion kept him in constant disagreement with 
 his colleagues, and even with the brother whom he 
 so truly loved, and to whom he owed so much; 
 though it is pleasant to know that the difference 
 was made up before William Hunter died. And 
 beyond all this, as Abernethy, who knew and loved 
 him well, pathetically says,t " Those who precede 
 others must necessarily remain alone. ... In 
 such a situation stood Mr. Hunter with relation to 
 his contemporaries. It was a comfortless preced- 
 ence, for it deprived him of sympathy and social 
 co-operation, and he felt that his labours and merits 
 were not known or fairly estimated." So also Sir 
 A. Cooper, speaking of Cline, his "beloved master," 
 says, " His high opinion of Mr. Hunter shows his 
 judgment, for almost all others of Mr. Hunter's 
 contemporaries, although they praise him now, 
 abused him while he lived." J 
 
 He had indeed few friends, yet some few he had 
 who clave to him with true affection, and that is as 
 much as most of us can expect. He was not a man 
 likely to conciliate everybody and to form a large 
 circle of so-called " friends," but the few who 
 
 * " His temper was very warm and impatient, readily provoked, 
 and when irritated not easily sootlied." — Home's ' Life,' p. Ixv. 
 t ' Hunterian Oration,' 1819. 
 X ' Cooper's Life,' by Bransby Cooper, ii, 337.
 
 16 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 knew him thoroughly, like Clift and William Bell* 
 and Jenner, remained tenderly attached to him, and 
 he had those sterling qualities which win and keep 
 the affections of such men. He was indifferent to 
 money, and far too deeply penetrated with the love 
 of higher things to care for places and titles. So 
 he lived poor, though he earned a large income, and 
 died so poor that his widow could not pay the 
 expense of a monument to him in Westminster 
 Abbey. It was left for the enthusiasm of our 
 generation, under the guidance of a good and loyal 
 St. George's man — our lamented friend Frank 
 Buckland — to supply the omission. And had it 
 not been that the Government, which had shortly 
 before refused with contempt the offer of the gift of 
 William Hunter's Museum, was persuaded to pur- 
 chase that of John Hunter, his family would have 
 been penniless ; for amongst Hunter's virtues that 
 of making provision for those dependent on him 
 was wanting. The purchase, however, was made, 
 and so the long widowhoodf of Anne Hunter was 
 not passed in penury. Hunter's family life seems 
 to have been happy and even gay. His wife was a 
 woman of grace and accomplishments. One of the 
 
 * Bell, who was engaged to stay in Hunter's house for ten years, 
 remained fourteen, apparently out of pure love for the work and for 
 its master. 
 
 t It is mentioned in Chevalier's ' Huntei-ian Oration,' 1821, that 
 Mrs. Hunter had died on January 7 of that year in the seventy- 
 ninth year of her age, having survived her husband more than 
 twenty- seven years.
 
 INTEODUCTOEY ADDRESS. 17 
 
 songs she wrote, " My Mother bids me bind my 
 Hair," was set to Haydn's music, and is still a 
 favourite ; and at his country house at Earl's 
 Court (of which our friend Mr. Roberts has pre- 
 served for us so faithful a picture) Hunter seems 
 to have had all that he wanted to make life pleasant. 
 There he could take what repose he chose to ajfford 
 himself from the constant distractions of London 
 practice, and that repose consisted largely in fol- 
 lowing out his observations in natural history, 
 among the numerous inhabitants of the menagerie 
 he kept in his house and garden ; studying the 
 habits of bees and the functions of plants or making 
 series of experiments on eggs, both for embryo- 
 logical purposes and to illustrate his theory of life. 
 Partly also he enjoyed family life and a little quiet 
 society, and the rupture of his tendo Achillis shows 
 that at the age of forty he had not outlived the 
 Scottish taste for dancing. 
 
 All that we know of Hunter's personal habits 
 seems to me to show him as a kindly, humorous man, 
 rough, it may be, in his language (but that was far 
 from peculiar in those days), rough also in his 
 temper, and very eager (as his brother was also) in 
 the defence of his rights in his discoveries, which 
 he prized above all other things ; but a fast friend, 
 sympathetic and helpful to his friends in trouble,* 
 
 * A pleasant anecdote is recorded how Hunter offered his friend 
 Lynn a loan of £200 when he was labouring under a long illness from 
 syphilitic infection contracted in a post-mortem examination. Lynn 
 
 2
 
 18 INTRODUCTOEY ADDRESS. 
 
 generous in their assistance, even when in want 
 himself, constant in his love and not implacable in 
 his hate.* 
 
 His obvious superiority to the men of his time 
 seems to have been early felt ; and although we are 
 told of his difficulties in making his way in practice, 
 the facts of his life show little trace of them. It 
 was in 1763 that he returned from the war "with 
 nothing certain to depend on but his half-pay," 
 says his biographer. Yet in 1766 we find him 
 
 replied that he did not then require assistance, but would not fail 
 to apply for it should he be afterwards in want. " Nay," said 
 Hunter, " what I offer I will do now, but what I may be able to do 
 a week hence it is impossible for me to say." On his recovery Lynn 
 went to thank him for his kindness and found that Hunter had 
 forgotten the whole matter. Many such acts of generosity have no 
 doubt passed unrecorded. 
 
 * Abernethy speaks thus of Hunter's manners and private cha- 
 racter : " Harshness, I am convinced, could never have proceeded 
 from a mind attuned like that of John Hunter. I do not wish to 
 deny or conceal that occasionally the candour and susceptibility of 
 his character might incite him to express his vexation and indigna- 
 tion with a degree of energy and openness that would give offence. 
 Yet for this occasional want of temper many and perfectly exculpa- 
 tory causes may be stated. Mr. Hunter's life was one of continual 
 exertion, perplexity, and irritation. He was constantly engaged in 
 the search and consideration of new facts. ' My mind,' said he to 
 me, ' is like a beehive,' and the simile struck me on account of its 
 correctness, for in the midst of busy and apparent confusion there 
 was great order, regularity of structure, and abundant food, col- 
 lected with incessant industry from uhe choicest stores of Nature. 
 It will be generally admitted that the want of money would be an 
 adequate cause of perplexity, yet to Mr. Hunter the very means by 
 which the necessary supplies were to be produced proved sources of 
 irritation. The search for money led him fx-om the more congenial 
 pursuit of knowledge ; it broke into his arrangements, distracted 
 his attention, and we find him complaining of this like one who 
 had felt it sorely." — ' Hmiterian Oration,' 1819.
 
 iNTEODtJOTORY ADDRESS. 19 
 
 purchasing the ground and building the house at 
 Earl's Court ; and though it is true that he was 
 always in want of money, that is not remarkable 
 when we hear from his brother-in-law that " as soon 
 as he had accumulated fees to the amount of ten 
 guineas he always purchased some addition to his 
 collection." 
 
 Hunter's attachment to his wife seems to have 
 been lasting and sincere, yet he postponed his mar- 
 riage till 1771, because " his income was consider- 
 ably under £1,000 a year, and scarcely sufficed for 
 his own expenses." In other words, he would not 
 give up his researches to expedite his marriage. 
 A wise decision, and one from which the world is 
 still benefiting, and will always benefit. But it is 
 clear that Hunter must have made a fair income 
 from the first, and must have been looked on as a 
 man of mark. Another proof of this is his election 
 into the Royal Society as early as 1767, " before his 
 brother William, who had been ten years longer in 
 London, and certainly at this time occupied a higher 
 station in public opinion than he did," says Ottley. 
 In spite, then, of the higher social standing of the 
 elder brother, there were influential persons in the 
 Royal Society who saw that the younger was the 
 greater man. 
 
 Hunter rose gradually into very lucrative practice, 
 though he was quite incapable of the arts of popu- 
 larity and though he was far from greedy of fees, and 
 on the death of Pott he became incontestably the
 
 20 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 first surgeon in London,* and his income at the time 
 of his death is stated at £6,000 a year. But all his 
 money went into his museum, to the extent, Mr. 
 Marshall tells us, of £70,000 ; and even after his 
 death it continued to absorb all his available re- 
 sources, so that his library, his country house, his 
 collections of works of art, all had to be sold in 
 order to keep the museum in saleable condition, 
 while Mrs. Hunter and her two children were sup- 
 ported by "the King's Bounty," a fund analogous 
 to the civil list of the present day, but only available 
 for two years. 
 
 Another point from which we must view the life 
 of Hunter on this occasion is as a member of this 
 School. What did he do for St. Greorge's when alive, 
 and what influence has his work and his example 
 had on our school after his death ? 
 
 Now, it is painful to confess — still the confession 
 must be made — that Hunter's career at St. George's 
 was an unhappy one. He looked with scant respect 
 on his colleagues, and they opposed him bitterly. 
 I do not profess to give an opinion on the rights of 
 this most unfortunate disagreement. Hunter's col- 
 leagues, as surgeons to St. George's, were men of 
 respectable abilities, and some of them, at any rate, 
 of distinguished position, nor did all of them take 
 
 * " In his riper years," says Sir A. Carlisle (' Hunterian Oration,' 
 1820), " and when the abstract acquisitions of his study had become 
 Itlended with copious experience, he was appealed to, equally by 
 physicians and surgeons, as the final judge upon all unsettled ques- 
 tions of pathology."
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 21 
 
 part in the fray. Those who did so were Bromfield, 
 Grunning, Walker, and T. Keate.* They seem to 
 have regarded Hunter as more of a physiologist and 
 philosopher than a surgeon, and had no great re- 
 spect for him in those provinces. In fact, I think it 
 was one of them who profanely said of the Hun- 
 terian Museum that it was " of no more use than so 
 many pigs' pettitoes." On the other hand, Hunter 
 regarded them — and unfortunately did not hesitate 
 to speak of them in no measured terms — as routine 
 practitioners, hardly fit to teach surgery, because 
 they had never learnt it ; useless and lazy in the 
 school, and envious of those whom they could not 
 appreciate. 
 
 One fact comes out, I think, clearly from the 
 accounts we have received of this fatal quarrel, viz. 
 that Hunter was a zealous and successful clinical 
 teacher, while his opponents were the reverse. He 
 is reported to have been a dull and ineffective lec- 
 turer, and his formal lectures were never largely 
 
 * Thomas Keate, uncle to the distinguished surgeon Robert 
 Keate, who was the senior member of the staff in my early student 
 days, is said in the ' Dictionary of Biography ' to have been " un- 
 punctual and negligent in his hospital duties." But he seems to 
 have followed Hunter's practice in aneurism, as he was the first, 
 according to Guthrie, to tie the subclavian for aneurism. Bromfield 
 also, though he wrote in depreciation of Hunter's operation, was 
 present at a similar operation successfully performed by his own 
 son. 
 
 Mem. — Keate's case is described summarily, and without date, by 
 Guthrie C' Wounds and Injuries of Arteries,' 1846, p. 40). It was a 
 ligature of what we should call the first part of the axillary. 
 Ramsden, in 1809, was the first to tie the subclavian above the 
 clavicle.
 
 22 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 attended, thougli " his classes," says Paget, " in- 
 cluded nearly everyone who in the generation after 
 him had any great reputation in surgery in this 
 country." But he seems to have been fond of bed- 
 side teaching, and the excellence of the practical 
 remarks scattered broadcast over his works, together 
 with the pithy, lucid style in which these practical 
 aphorisms are conveyed, show that he must have 
 been a clinical teacher of the highest order.* On 
 the other side, two utterances of his colleagues, 
 which Hunter quotes, leave us in no doubt of their 
 qualifications as teachers. One " did not choose to 
 hazard his reputation by giving lectures," which, at 
 
 * " Hunter's writings," says Mr. Holden (' Hunterian Ovation,' 
 p. 25), "teem with examples which show what an impressive teacher 
 he was, how supreme was his skill in turning all his knowledge to 
 account, and with what happy enthusiasm he started others on the 
 road to gain knowledge for themselves. To take a single instance I 
 would especially point to his description of the organs of mastica- 
 tion and digestion. . . . When I first read it, it filled me with 
 astonishment. ' Would to Heaven,' I said, ' that we had the whole 
 of anatomy described in this powerful way; we should hear fewer 
 complaints of its " dryness and dulness " ! ' The language is so lucid, 
 so terse, and withal so pictorial. There is an interest too and 
 charm in every detail, and with each fact is given some illustra- 
 tion, with all the text its full and proper comment." 
 
 Mr. Holden also quotes Cline as saying, " When only twenty-four 
 years of age I had the happiness of hearing the first course of 
 lectures which John Hunter delivered. I had been at that time for 
 some years in the profession, and w.^s tolerably well acquainted 
 with the opinions held by the surgeons most distinguished for their 
 talents then residing in the metropolis; but having heai-d Mr. 
 Hunter's lectures on the subject of disease, I found them so far 
 superior to anything I had conceived or heard before that thei-e 
 seemed no comparison between the great mind of the man who 
 delivered them and all the individuals, whether ancient or modern, 
 who had gone before him."
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 23 
 
 least, as Hunter sarcastically says, " was modest of 
 him." Another "did not see where the art could 
 be improved," and therefore, doubtless did not see 
 that the Hunterian operation for popliteal aneurism 
 was any improvement on amputation. It is no 
 wonder that, under such teachers, the number of 
 students was small, and that of these the great 
 majority wished to be Hunter's pupils. Still, in the 
 precise matter leading to the fatal quarrel Hunter 
 seems to most men to have been in the wrong ; and 
 in any case it would have been better if one so far 
 superior to his fellows could have brought himself 
 to treat them with more consideration.* But, 
 
 * To my mind one of the most interesting works on Hunter ia 
 Abernethy's ' Physiological Lectures,' not a regular biography nor 
 an exact account of Huntei"'s philosophy, but a blending of the two, 
 a work written by a man himself of no ordinary power of mind, and 
 one who knew Hunter well, respected him as a teacher, and loved 
 him as a friend. Howship says in his ' Hunterian Oration,' 1833, 
 " If you ask who was his most eloquent, most ingenious, and most 
 faithful commentator ? it will not be necessary that I should reply 
 — the late Mr. Abernethy." " I was acquainted with Mr. Hunter," 
 says Abernethy (p. 199), " at a period of his life when he must have 
 greatly interested anyone who duly appreciated the results of his 
 talents and labours, or who had any sympathy for the highly 
 susceptible mind of genivis, rendered still more so by excess of 
 exertion, and the perturbed feelings incident to bodily disease. He 
 seemed to be conscious of his own desert, of the insufficiency and 
 uncertainty of his acquirements, and of his own inability readily to 
 communicate what he knew and thought. He felt irritated by the 
 opposition he met with in establishing his opinions, and still more 
 by finding, when he had surmounted this difficulty, that those 
 opinions were, by the malice of mankind, ascribed to others. All 
 which, I think, may be fairly inferred from a single sentence he one 
 day addressed to me. " 1 know, I know," said he, " I am but a 
 pigmy in knowledge, yet I feel as a giant when compared with these
 
 24 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 though his relations with his surgical colleagues 
 were so unfortunate, his influence on the medical 
 school was beneficent and lasting. Let us never 
 forget that Hunter was the first to introduce the 
 systematic teaching of surgery into this hospital, 
 and that the quarrel in which his life was sacrificed 
 was excited by his proposals for that purpose. His 
 colleagues were not all hostile ; two, at any rate, 
 were united to him, both by affection and consan- 
 guinity. Dr. Baillie, his sister's son, who united to 
 the most eminent talents and professional accom- 
 plishments a sweetness of disposition in which his 
 great relative was deficient, and his brother-in-law, 
 Home, who I have no doubt regarded him with true 
 aff'ection, though in his latter years he was betrayed 
 into conduct which not only darkened his own good 
 name, but involved the most serious detriment to 
 the fame of Hunter.* Then Hunter had many dis- 
 tinguished pupils at the hospiital, such as Jenner, 
 Thomas, the younger Gunning, R. Keate, Physick, 
 the celebrated American surgeon, f and many others, 
 
 * On the very painful subject of Home's conduct as Hunter's 
 literary executor I need only say that Home destroyed all the 
 manuscript notes which Hunter left of his museum, and also the 
 notes from which Hunter delivered his successive courses of sur- 
 gical lectures, and which he had corrected and re-corrected with his 
 own hand. Home alleged that he did this by his brother-in-law's 
 own direction ; but it is impossible to believe this ; and an obvious 
 motive for the destruction of the museum notes is found in the 
 numerous papers which Home contributed to the Royal Society 
 after Hunter's death, and which are believed to have been drawn 
 from these notes. Why he should have destroyed the manuscript 
 of the lectures is less easy to understand. 
 
 t Physick was one of those who had a warm pei'sonal regard for
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 25 
 
 who kept up the memory and the traditions of their 
 master till a younger generation arose^ in which 
 we may distinguish the great name of Brodie, so 
 thoroughly Hunterian in his principles and practice, 
 of Babington (the uncle of T. Babington Macaulay) 
 who, though he did too little for surgery, yet paid 
 no small service to Hunter's memory by editing his 
 work on the venereal disease in Palmer's edition ; of 
 Rose, whose sagacious observations on syphilis * did 
 so much to correct some of Hunter's doctrines, and 
 to limit that indiscriminate use of mercury which 
 was one of the terrors of the older surgery; of 
 Palmer, who will ever receive the gratitude of the 
 profession as the able and judicious editor of 
 Hunter's works ; and lastly of OsBsar Hawkins. 
 
 These men, and men like these, have handed 
 down to us as a sacred deposit, in trust for our 
 successors, the memory of the greatest man that 
 ever adorned our hospital, the greatest man indeed 
 who ever practised surgery. That deposit was well 
 kept and that trust well fulfilled by your immediate 
 predecessors — the school of Hewett's time. It is 
 for you, gentlemen, to see that it does not suffer in 
 yours. 
 
 Having so far dealt with Hunter's life, I now 
 turn to his works. These present themselves to us 
 in three kinds : his work as a surgeon, his work as 
 a natural philosopher, and his museum. 
 
 Hunter, as warmly returned by the latter, who would fain have kept 
 him in England as his assistant. 
 
 * 'Med-Chir. Trans.,' vol. viii, p. 349.
 
 26 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 As a surgeon Hunter did relatively less than in 
 either of the other two directions. In his surgical 
 writings he seems as if oppressed by his method.* 
 He had set before himself the gigantic task of 
 tracing surgery to its first principles in the qualities 
 of matter, in the operations of that matter when 
 organised, in the laws and actions of the human 
 body, and the effects of remedies in modifying those 
 actions. No other surgeon had preceded him in 
 that arduous path, and the space of thirty years, f 
 
 * Hunter's works are naturally divided into Surgical or Practical 
 and Physiological or Scientific. Of the former one can hardly speak 
 adequately without going much into detail, nor is it profitable to 
 read them unless the reader can spare the time to meditate on each 
 separate proposition, to trace the reasoning which led the author to 
 his conclusions, to see where and why he was misled, and to appre- 
 ciate the profound sagacity, the unwearied labour, and the bold 
 originality which led to the composition of works so far in advance 
 of the surgeons of his time. But if a man has sufficient knowledge 
 of surgery to judge of their value, and sufficient time really to 
 study them, that time could not be devoted to a moi'e remunerative 
 study. 
 
 Hunter's practical works are the ' Treatise on the Blood,' &c., 
 the ' Lectures on the Principles of Surgery,' the ' Treatise on the 
 Venereal Disease,' and the ' Treatise on the Teeth,' to which may be 
 added a few detached papers, ' On the Inflammation of the Internal 
 Coats of Veins,' ' On Introsusception,' ' On Loose Cartilages,' 
 ' On Horny Excrescences,' and ' On Artificial Feeding in a Case of 
 Paralysis of the Muscles of Deglutition.' Sir E. Home's two 
 papers on the Hunterian operation for aneurism and the account of 
 Hunter's evidence on the trial of C;'.ptain Donellan, though not 
 written by Hunter himself, form also a part of his surgical works. 
 
 t We can hardly date the commencement of Hunter's career as a 
 surgical teacher eai-lier than his return from abroad in 1763, thirty 
 years before his death, though he commenced his studies fourteen 
 years earlier, and was house surgeon at St. George's in 1756. As to 
 the museum, Owen says that " Hunter had passed his thirtieth year 
 before he had collected a single preparation for himself. All that
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 27 
 
 during whicli he was permitted to follow it, was 
 too short even for his genius to show a fair sample 
 of the results which might be obtained from it, and 
 which, after the lapse of a single century, we see in 
 so great a degree already attained from studying 
 and practising surgery as a branch of the science of 
 life. All Hunter's work was incomplete. The 
 work of every philosopher must be so, more or less. 
 But his work in practical surgery was the most 
 incomplete portion of the whole. Practical surgery, 
 in fact, was not so entirely the object of his life 
 as were his biological and pathological researches. 
 Hence, we need not be surprised that one of his 
 best critics. Sir J. Paget,* does not hesitate to 
 prefer Pott to Hunter as a practical surgeon. And 
 yet as a surgeon Hunter must rank very high. 
 Not only in the ' Lectures,' but throughout his 
 works, there are abundant proofs of his sagacious 
 judgment and his superiority to that tyranny of 
 custom which binds the practice of inferior men in 
 the chains of an ignorant past. His great work on 
 the Blood, &c., laid a foundation for surgical patho- 
 logy which can never be shaken, and would of 
 itself sujB&ce to immortalise him as a surgeon ; as 
 an operator he was bold (his detractors said even 
 to rashness t), and seems to have been success- 
 lie had made before that time were added to his brother's collec- 
 tion." — (Preface to vol. iv of Palmer's edition, p. xxxvii.) 
 
 * Paget, ' Hunterian Oration,' p. 54. 
 
 t " The chief operations performed by him at this period out of 
 the hospital consisted in such undertakings as the judgment of able
 
 28 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 f ul ; * and his operation for popliteal aneurism is a 
 splendid achievement in itself, and a model of an 
 advance in surgery resting on the soundest basis of 
 physiological and pathological reasoning. The 
 operations (five in number) which Hunter himself 
 performed were remarkably successful, considering 
 the condition of surgery in those days. Stanley f 
 says, in 1839, " almost to the present time were 
 living the two individuals who were the subjects of 
 the first and the third operations for aneurism per- 
 formed by Mr. Hunter." (There is a mistake in 
 these numbers. Hunter's first patient died of 
 
 surgeons had induced them to decline. Such desperate cases John 
 Hunter was never found to hesitate in embracing ; he sought for 
 the opportunity rather than rejected it whenever it offered." — (Foot's 
 'Life of Hunter,' p. 247.) 
 
 * See Home's ' Life,' p. xxxi, for some instances of Hunter's daring 
 and success as an operator ; and see Paget, ' Lect. on Surg. Path.,' 
 1853, ii, 202, for the description of a large enchondroma (preserved 
 in the museum) removed by Hunter in one of the operations spoken 
 of by Home. In his ' Lectures ' Hunter speaks of having " tre- 
 panned below the insertion of the muscles of the neck and with 
 success," and of having performed the CEesarean and other rare 
 operations. Other authors speak of Hunter as an unskilful operator, 
 and he certainly in his ' Lectui'es,' vol. i, p. 210, calls operations " a 
 reflection on the healing art, a tacit acknowledgment of the in- 
 efficiency of surgery. It is like an armed savage who attempts to 
 get that by force which the civilised man would get by stratagem." 
 But in this he was thinking, I have no doubt, merely of the ampu- 
 tation or removal of diseased parts, ;.nd would not have spoken so 
 of the ligature of a wounded artery, the suture of a ruptured bladder, 
 or any of the numerous operations now undertaken for strictly 
 curative objects. In another place he says, " Operations by which 
 we mutilate a patient whom we cannot cure are an acknowledgment 
 of the imperfection of our art." But surely operations which do not 
 mutilate and do cure are some of its most perfect achievements. 
 
 f Stanley, ' Hunterian Oration.'
 
 iNTRODUC'tOEY ADDRESS. 29 
 
 another cause fifteen months after the operation.) 
 " To each of these individuals about forty years of 
 Hfe, with integrity of limb, was given by this 
 splendid achievement of surgery." One of these 
 men died in extreme old age, and the limb operated 
 on was injected by Mr. Wormald and exhibited at 
 his * Hunter ian Oration ' in 1857. Hunter also, 
 though he had no opportunity of tying any artery 
 but the femoral in Hunter's canal, pointed out 
 (vol. i, p. 549) that many other arteries — the 
 carotid arteries and their branches, the subclavian 
 and its branches, and the femoral where Scarpa 
 afterwards tied it — are available for the operation. 
 And I ought to add that the fame of this great 
 surgical triumph attracted the attention of eminent 
 foreign surgeons, who came to London to see what 
 was so novel to them and so admirable.* So that 
 the labours of Hunter raised the reputation of the 
 English school of surgery to a height which it 
 would never have obtained from those of his com- 
 peers, even though the latter might be equal or 
 even greater than he as practical surgeons. 
 
 It may seem strange that Hunter should have 
 commenced his authorship in surgery by a treatise 
 on the natural history and diseases of the teeth. f 
 Probably he was more easily satisfied with his re- 
 
 * Roux, ' Quarante Annees,' ii, 89. Assalini imported Hunter's 
 operation into Italy. 
 
 t The first part (physiological) was published in 1771, the 
 second (practical) in 1778. The treatise on the venereal disease in 
 1786.
 
 30 INTRODUCTOEY ADDRESS. 
 
 searches in this limited field than in the more ex- 
 tensive provinces of pathology and surgery. The 
 anatomical or physiological portion of the work has 
 received the enthusiastic praise of one of the best 
 anatomical teachers of our day — Mr. Holden* — 
 and deserves it, for Hunter is never seen to more 
 advantage than in anatomico-physiological descrip- 
 tion. There he is never laboured, never obscure, 
 never wearisome. His reasoning is usually as clear 
 as his description is terse and luminous ; and I do 
 not doubt that the practical portion of the book 
 marks a great advance on the semi-barbarous 
 dentistry of the day, while the section on trans- 
 plantation is highly curious and of much speculative 
 interest. 
 
 Hunter's work on gunshot wounds was a great 
 step towards their rational treatment, and laid the 
 foundation of modern military surgery. f 
 
 His treatise on the venereal disease has been 
 very variously estimated by different critics. | The 
 
 * See footnote, p. 22, supra. 
 
 t " As the wounded soldier was rescued by Amb. Pare from the 
 torture of boiling oil, in like manner was he protected by John 
 Hunter from the torture of the knife " (Sir D. Dundas, ' Hunterian 
 Oration,' 1818). " The light of science can hardly be said to have 
 penetrated this important province of military surgery until the 
 great and last work of John Hunter on the ' Blood, Inflammation, 
 and Gunshot Wounds ' was published." — (Sir T. Longmore on 
 " Gunshot Injuries," Holmes' ' System of Surgery,' 3rd edit., i, 462.) 
 
 X Mr. Hutchinson says, " Some of his eulogists claim it as a 
 masterpiece." It has not, however, commended itself altogether to 
 the acute judgment of such eminent surgeons as Lawi-ence, Brodie, 
 and Mr. Hutchinson himself. 
 
 " In investigating the venereal disease," says Lawrence (' Hun-
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. Bl 
 
 subject was evidently a favourite one for his 
 researches and speculations, and the work was 
 published and republished in his lifetime. Yet the 
 reader cannot but be conscious of imperfections in 
 it. The first thing that strikes us is the strange 
 
 tei'ian Oration,' 1834), " Mi-. Hunter abandoned tlie course of pro- 
 ceeding which he had pursued so safely in other departments of 
 pathology. Instead of taking up the subject de novo and examining 
 the facts for himself, he adopted the cuiTent notions respecting the 
 progressive and destructive nature of syphilis, and the specific 
 powei'S of mercury in arresting the disorder. He made the 
 influence of that remedy a test of the nature of the disease, main- 
 taining that affections which admit of cure without the use of mer- 
 cury are not venereal. Hence his treatise, instead of represeating 
 faithfully the course of nature, is chiefly occupied in the endeavour 
 to make facts accord with these pre-conceived notions. As the latter 
 are unfounded the structure built upon them falls to the ground. 
 The high authority of Mr. Hunter confirmed and extended these 
 pernicious mistakes, giving origin to the imaginary distinction 
 between venereal diseases and those resembling them, to the 
 fanciful creation of pseudo-syphilis and syphiloid diseases, by 
 which so much confusion, uncertainty, and embarrassment, have 
 been introduced into an important department of surgical pathology 
 and practice."' 
 
 Brodie (' Hunterian Oration,' 1837) says, " His treatise on the 
 ' Lues Venerea' is a most elaborate work, and contains a great number 
 of interesting pathological speculations and other important matter ; 
 but it must, nevertheless, be acknowledged that it aff'ords but an 
 imperfect representation of the long train of various symptoms 
 which fall under the observation of an experienced practitioner." 
 
 And Mr. Hutchinson (" Hunterian Oration," ' Lancet,' 1891, vol. i) 
 says, " Were I to venture an attempt to estimate the value of 
 Hunter's work on the venei-eal diseases I should be compelled in 
 all honesty to declare that it was in many respects behind the 
 knowledge of the day. It abounds in sagacious thought, but yet, 
 on not a few matters of detail, those who had written before him 
 entertained opinions which to me seem more accurate. It betrays 
 too great confidence in the author's own opinions, and a want of 
 respect for those of othei's, which would come only from want of 
 knowledge and of facts."
 
 32 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 error of insisting on the identity in causation of 
 gonorrhoea and syphilis, in spite of the observation 
 frequently repeated that their cure is totally dif- 
 ferent. This error was, of course, due in the main 
 to the singular course taken by the inoculation of 
 supposed gonorrhoeal matter which Hunter practised 
 on himself, five years before his marriage, and in 
 consequence of which he suffered from symptoms of 
 constitutional syphilis for three years. How far it 
 is justifiable for a man thus to inflict on himself a 
 disease which may be transmitted to his children I 
 will not stop to discuss. That in this instance the 
 experiment was vitiated by a mistake at its origin is 
 now universally admitted. Another blemish on the 
 treatise is that Hunter did not discover, what his 
 successor at St. George's, Mr. Rose, found out 
 twenty years after Hunter died, that mercury is 
 not necessary for the cure of all chancres, but 
 believed, on the contrary, that syphilis, if unchecked 
 by mercury, must go on to the destruction of the 
 parts,* and therefore lent the great weight of his 
 authority to that indiscriminate and ruthless use of 
 mercury, which became really worse than the disease 
 it was intended to cure. Nor is it without dis- 
 appointment that one reads in a work from so great 
 an observer a flat denial that the testicle "is ever 
 affected with the venereal disease either local or 
 constitutional," t a doubt whether " a foetus in the 
 
 * Works, ii, 143. f Ibid., p. 1«2.
 
 INTEODUOTORY ADDRESS. 33 
 
 womb of a pocky mother may be infected by her,"* 
 and dubious statements that " there are inflamma- 
 tions of the eyes which are supposed to be venereal/'f 
 and that " we have not seen the brain affected, the 
 heart, stomach, liver, kidneys, or other viscera, 
 although such cases are described in authors."! 
 
 To set against these obvious defects and others 
 which might easily be added, if it were wise to dwell 
 on the errors rather than the merits of so great a 
 man, we have the celebrated description of the 
 Hunterian chancre, which has served for the starting- 
 point of all later investigations; the judicious and 
 eminently practical observations on " the supposed 
 consequences of gonorrhoea," which is really a 
 treatise — though not a formally complete one — on 
 genito-urinary diseases, and shows that Hunter was 
 at home in the operative treatment of the severest 
 forms of stricture and retention ; but, above and 
 beyond all, we have that ardent spirit of inquiry 
 which shrank from no method of investigation, 
 which did not spare his own body, nor the possible 
 ruin of his future life, and which, by dwelling 
 so much on the importance of inoculation, en- 
 couraged others to persevere in a way which could 
 not fail to lead to juster views than those which he 
 had himself attained. So then, even admitting that 
 
 * Works, p. 385. 
 
 t Ibid., p. 417. 
 
 X Ibid., p. 396. So in the ' Treatise on the Blood,' iii, 6, he 
 expresses his belief that " the vital parts are perhaps not at all 
 susceptible " of the venereal disease. 
 
 3
 
 34 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 this is not Hunter's most successful work, we are 
 still entitled to regard it as a most useful contribu- 
 tion to practical surgery. 
 
 Hunter's ' Principles of Surgery ' is a work on 
 which he spent as much labour and time as he did 
 on the treatise on the Blood. He corrected and re- 
 corrected the text with his own hand ; and it is 
 most vexatious to think that the work we have is 
 not the original, but only a cento of various copies 
 of notes kept by attentive listeners. Yet these must 
 have been unusually good students and note-takers, 
 for the work is Hunter all over, both in style and 
 matter. Much of the theoretical part is condensed 
 from the ' Treatise on the Blood.' The practical 
 portion, Mr. Power tells us, is less minute and 
 detailed than the contemporary treatises of Heister 
 and Pare, and is of course no longer up to the 
 standard of surgical practice ; but as a whole the 
 work is monumental, worthy of the great name 
 it bears^ than which no praise can be higher. 
 Sir Gr. Humphry (' Hunterian Oration,' p. 9), well 
 says, " It is the most comprehensive, the most 
 philosophic, and the best exposition of the subject 
 ever written ; the work which it is the most profit- 
 able to read, the one which more than any other 
 carries us above craft and technical details into the 
 region of principles and general laws. Would that it 
 was more studied by ourselves, and more com- 
 mended to those whom we teach and examine." 
 
 Another department of surgery in which Hunter
 
 INTRODUOTORY ADDRESS. 35 
 
 made a commencementj which has since expanded 
 into a wide province of the art of healing, is sub- 
 cutaneous surgery. Hunter had, indeed, " a body 
 which did him grievous wrong." He was persecuted 
 for many years with fierce pains, with strange con- 
 fusions of sensation, and obscurations of mental 
 power ; and it is one of the most astonishing things 
 in the perusal of his works to see the curious inter- 
 est with which he studied his own symptoms, even 
 when he thought he was dying, and used the retro- 
 spect for the advancement of himself and his 
 scholars in pathological science. All readers of 
 Hunter will recollect the account of the seizure in 
 which he noticed that his pulse was imperceptible 
 and his breathing had stopped, and in which he 
 resorted to voluntary motions of respiration, since 
 " it struck him " that if he did not " he should have 
 died" — though on reflecting afterwards on the 
 matter, he thinks he might not have died after all.* 
 Few can think, without admiring wonder, on the 
 courage and devotion of a man who could thus 
 coolly watch his own mortal agonies and use them 
 for the benefit of the science which he loved. A 
 much lighter aflfliction befell Hunter when he rup- 
 tured his tendo Achillis in dancing. The confine- 
 ment necessitated by this accident he used for the 
 study of the process of union in tendons, and for 
 
 * This seizure is twice described : once in the ' Treatise on the 
 Blood,' &c., vol. iii, p. 193, and again more fully in the ' Lectures on 
 Surgery,' voh i, p. 244.
 
 36 INTRODTTCTORt ADDRESS. 
 
 that purpose lie " divided the same tendon in 
 several dogs by introducing a couching needle under 
 the skin at some distance from it, and killed the 
 dogs at different periods to see the progress of 
 the union"* — thus laying the foundation of sub- 
 cutaneous surgery. 
 
 Even in abdominal surgery, which we justly 
 regard as a peculiar triumph of modern times, and 
 as depending on the recent improvements in the 
 treatment of wounds, the vigour of Hunter's mind, 
 and the originahty of his practice, enabled him to 
 point out the path, which it was not given to him, 
 or the men of his day, to follow. Speaking of cases 
 of suppurative peritonitis he says, " How far in 
 such cases it might appear desirable to make an 
 opening into the abdomen and throw in warm water 
 repeatedly to wash away the matter I will not at 
 present determine." f And in treating of gunshot 
 wounds of the abdomen, where viscera are bruised 
 beyond repair, but not opened, he speaks with a 
 wise mixture of caution and hopefulness, pointing 
 out how often adhesive peritonitis precludes fatal 
 extravasation.! 
 
 The little tract on ' Inflammation of the In- 
 ternal Coats of Veins ' forms the basis on which all 
 the elaborate pathological and surgical inquiry is 
 founded which has done so much, not only to give 
 
 * Ottley's ' Life,' vol. i, p. 34. 
 
 t Works, vol. iii, p. 40-i. 
 
 X ' On Gunshot Wounds,' chap, ii, § 3.
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 37 
 
 US a knowledge of phlebitis and pyaemia, but, what 
 is much more important, to anticipate their causes 
 and prevent them. It seems strange that so sug- 
 gestive and so practical a tract did not gain more 
 attention from Hunter's contemporaries, and equally 
 strange that symptoms so marked as those of 
 pyaemia were not recognised by so acute an observer 
 as Hunter himself. 
 
 But the great service which Hunter rendered to 
 surgery was, no doubt, through its connection with 
 pathology, and on pathology he laboured, not only 
 more abundantly than all his contemporaries, but 
 in quite a different spirit, and with far higher aims, 
 because he regarded disease as a part of nature.* 
 This character is impressed peculiarly on the great 
 treatise on the ' Blood, Inflammation, and Gunshot 
 Wounds,' the merit of which (and I think no words 
 can well exaggerate its merits) consists less in its 
 theory of inflammation than in its method, by 
 which all the principles of disease and treatment 
 are souo^ht to be deduced from the laws of nature in 
 the whole animated creation. f Yet how admirable 
 is Hunter's theory of inflammation when we reflect 
 on the state of pathology in his time,| and on the 
 
 * Abernetby well said of him, " He discovered a vital principle in 
 physiology active in producing correct pathology. I may well call 
 him the first and great physionosologist."— (' Hunterian Oration,' 
 1819.) 
 
 t " He eifected more by the questions that he set than by the 
 answers that he worked out."— (Sir W. Savory, ' Hunterian Oration,' 
 p. 10.) 
 
 J " If any one," says Paget, " would see what progress Hunter
 
 38 INTEODUOTORY ADDEESS. 
 
 imperfection of the instruments with which he 
 worked ! * how very near the more complete in- 
 vestigations of this age of microscopy ! how lumin- 
 ous as an introduction to universal pathology If 
 
 If 5 then, we allow that Hunter's work as a philoso- 
 pher, and as the founder of the museum, surpassed 
 in value his work as a surgeon, we must also admit 
 that as a practical surgeon he was of the first rank, 
 and that as " The Founder of Scientific Surgery " 
 (the title justly inscribed on his monument in the 
 Abbey,! ^^ rendered a greater service to our art 
 
 gained for scientific surgery let him compare bis writings on inflam- 
 mation with those of Bromfield." — ' Hunterian Oration,' note L. 
 
 * Hunter did all he could with the microscopical instruments 
 with which he was acquainted, but that did not lead him far into 
 the science of histology, and, as Mr. Marshall (' Hunterian Oration,' 
 p. 15) has well said, he " had so large a field of observation in the 
 obvious conformation of the organs of animals open to his reach by 
 the aid of scalpel, scissors, and forceps, assisted occasionally by 
 magnifying powers, that he could well aflfoi'd to disregard the less 
 trustworthy information afforded by the imperfect microscopes of 
 his day." How imperfect they were will best appear from the 
 perusal of Hunter's note to that section (chap, i, § 4) of the ' Treatise 
 on the Blood,' &c., which treats of the red globules. — (Yol. iii, p. 60.) 
 
 t " As regards the complex phenomena of inflammation, which 
 Hunter had so long and so carefully thought out, it may be said in 
 a word that the modern microscope, whilst adding so much to his 
 knowledge, would elucidate and confirm almost all his sagacious 
 conceptions. Those important agents in the inflammatory process, 
 the white corpuscles, although perhaps not altogether unknown, 
 were not sufficiently distinguished in Hunter's time. The existence 
 of these being granted, their amoebiform properties, their emigration 
 through the softened walls of the small vessels, their further action 
 on the tissues, their presence in lymph, and their identity with pus- 
 corpuscles would fill up the details in the Hunterian sketch." — 
 (Marshall, ' Hunterian Oration,' p. 35.) 
 
 J Hunter's claim to this title was asserted in the first Hunterian 
 Oration ever delivered, that by Sir E. Home in 1814. " From the
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 39 
 
 than it has ever been in any other man's power to 
 render. It is, however, difficult to fix Hunter's 
 exact place in surgery, for his claims depend as much 
 on what he suggested and originated as on what he 
 actually accomplished. " It may be said that nearly 
 all the advances that have been made in surgery 
 since the time of John Hunter may be found fore- 
 shadowed, or suggested, or actually adopted in his 
 writings, experiments, and practice."* 
 
 I must now speak as well as I can in the time at 
 my disposal of Hunter's writings on natural philo- 
 sophy. These are contained in the fourth volume of 
 Palmer's edition, as edited by Sir R. Owen. I need 
 not enumerate them. They are of the most varied 
 nature, and one at least of them ought to be classed 
 among the surgical. I mean the tract ' On the 
 Recovery of Drowned Persons,' which has the great 
 merit, so common in Hunter's writings, of seizing 
 the essential truth of the matter, which in this in- 
 stance is that " in recovering persons drowned, the 
 principal eflPect depends upon air being thrown into 
 the lungs." 
 
 Most of these papers have been collected and 
 published by their author in a book entitled ' Animal 
 (Economy.' Many persons regard this work as the 
 most valuable of Hunter's writings, and the one 
 
 time of Hunter our profession has no longer been confined within 
 the narrow limits of a practical art ; assisted by his labours it has 
 acquii'ed a new character, has assumed a more elevated form, and 
 has expanded itself to a science." 
 * Power, ' Hunterian Oration,' p. 4.
 
 40 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 most characteristic of its author. The latter praise 
 it deserves, for Hunter seems to me to have been 
 most at his ease when investigating scientific sub- 
 jects, detailing experiments, describing structures, 
 and reasoning on their uses ; but his great treatise 
 on the Blood and Inflammation surely exceeds in 
 value any, or indeed all, of his other writings. The 
 topics treated of in ' Animal (Economy ' are of the 
 most varied nature ; human physiologi/, as in the 
 descent of the testis, the function of the vesiculse 
 seminales, the structure of the gravid uterus and 
 placenta ; general physiologiji as in the lectures on 
 muscular motion, on absorption by veins, on diges- 
 tion and post-mortem digestion, the production of 
 heat in vegetables and animals,* &c. ; anatomy, as 
 in the exquisite description of the nerves which 
 supply the organs of smelling, on the air-cells in 
 birds, on the growth of bones, and numerous 
 descriptions of various animals; zoology, as in 
 the charming papers on whales t and on bees ; 
 
 * Animal heat was a subject which Hunter studied with especial 
 zeal, and on which he threw great light at a time when " it was 
 generally taught that the body obtained its heat from the blood, 
 which again derived it from the heart, or, as one asserted, from the 
 septum ventriculorum, whilst others derived it from a process of 
 fermentation, and others from the meeting of bile with lymph." — 
 (Power, ' Hunterian Oration.') 
 
 f The tract ' On the Structure and (Economy of Whales,' which 
 was originally published in vol. Ixxvii of the ' Phil. Trans.' (1787), 
 is mentioned by Abernethy with special commendation, and it is 
 truly a performance which shows Hunter at his best as a naturalist, 
 from the lucidity of the anatomical descriptions and the cogent 
 demonstration of the connection of those anatomical arrangements 
 with the habits rendered necessary by the position of a warm-
 
 INTEODDCTOEY ADDEESS. 41 
 
 and finally palaeontology, in tlie observations on the 
 fossil bones found near Bayreuth. No one knows 
 Hunter who has not read some of these papers, and 
 few who have read some will stop till they have read 
 all. But now I must try in a very few minutes to 
 give some intelligible sketch of Hunter as a writer. 
 In the first place it must be allowed that Hunter 
 was not intended for a writer at all, though no man 
 wrote more strenuously or more constantly than he 
 did. But what he was daily writing (and that 
 chiefly by the pens of his faithful amanuenses Clift 
 and Bell) was the careful description and registra- 
 tion of each specimen that he dissected — notes 
 which were lost to the world through his brother- 
 in-law's misconduct.* Hunter was confessedly a 
 
 blooded mammal inhabiting the depths of the sea. It is in this 
 tract that Hunter tells the story, so characteristic of his profuse 
 liberality where natural research was in question, of how he 
 engaged a surgeon at considerable expense (£500 say his biogra- 
 phers) to make a voyage to Greenland in a whaler, and furnished 
 him with all necessaries for examining and preserving the interest- 
 ing parts, and with instructions for making general observations, 
 and how all that he received for this great expense " was a piece of 
 whale's skin with some small animals sticking on it." 
 
 Among the vivid descriptions in this tract one more poetical and 
 picturesque than is common with Hunter gives a forcible picture of 
 the circulation in the spermaceti whale, the blood rushing with 
 immense velocity through an aorta of a foot in diameter under the 
 stroke of a heart which filled a wide tub, and threw out ten to 
 fifteen gallons of blood at a stroke. It may also be noticed that, 
 according to Sir R. Owen, " the minute, original, and accurate 
 account of the formation of whalebone was pirated by the editor of 
 the second edition of Cuvier's ' Anatomie Comparee,' to eke out the 
 imperfection of the account given by Cuvier himself." 
 
 * " It is," says Sir R. Owen, " to the zeal and industry which 
 induced Mr. Clift to transcribe portions of the Hunterian MSS., at a
 
 42 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 man of what is commonly called little education, i. e. 
 he had not much school learning. Hardly a letter of 
 his is preserved in which there are not gross errors 
 in spelling, and often they are so negligently ex- 
 pressed as to be quite unintelligible. I shall not 
 stay to consider whether this want of education was 
 a good or a bad thing for him — it was a necessity. 
 He did not choose to study when he was young, and 
 afterwards he had other things to do. But I would 
 say, with Le Gros Clark (' Hunterian Oration,' 
 p. 27), "I cannot persuade myself that he did not 
 really and deeply regret the wasted time and 
 unemployed talents which marked his career till 
 manhood overtook him." It would seem as if, 
 at one time, he or his friends contemplated his 
 entering the profession as a physician, since in 
 1753 his name was entered as a gentleman com- 
 moner at St. Mary's Hall, Oxford ; but Hunter 
 hated the notion of " stuffing Latin and Greek at 
 the University," as he expressed it, and he never 
 resided after his first term of six weeks. The result 
 of this defective education was that he had not 
 enough command of language to be certain of ex- 
 pressing his meaning. There are passages of much 
 force and beauty in his writings, his general style 
 has distinction and power of its own, but he is 
 often hopelessly obscure, and sometimes when his 
 
 period when he little suspected their ultimate fate, that we owe our 
 additional knowledge of the philosophical views which Hunter 
 entertained of the application of anatomical facts, and of the general 
 principles which he had deduced from them."— (Pref., p. xxxix.)
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 43 
 
 meaning is discoverable it is only after considerable 
 puzzling. He was conscious of this himself, and 
 writes to a friend, while the second edition of the 
 ' Treatise on the Venereal Disease ' was in prepara- 
 tion, " In order to render the language intelligible, 
 I meet a committee of three gentlemen,* to whose 
 correction every page is submitted." Whether it 
 would have been good or bad for Hunter himself 
 had he spent more time in school learning may be 
 doubtful, but that it would have been a good thing 
 for his readers if he had been able to express him- 
 self plainly no one can question. t But even though 
 Hunter had to struggle with a literary incapacity 
 which prevented him from making clear to others 
 the meaning of his thoughts, and though we are 
 justified in believing along with some of his most 
 sincere and most ardent admirers and scholars that 
 those thoughts were often not perfectly clear to his 
 own mind, yet in many cases the further progress 
 of science has cleared up dark places in Hunter's 
 
 * Babington tells us that the three were Sir G. Blane, Dr. Fordyce, 
 and Dr. Pitcairn, to whom a Mr. Marshall was afterwards joined. 
 He also says that their efforts did not produce much result. 
 
 f Of the many discussions of this matter, none, I think, is more 
 lucid or more satisfactory than Sir W. Savory's in his Hunterian 
 Oration, p. 26, " I confess that to me it seems the education, of 
 whatever kind, must indeed be a bad one, which is not better than 
 none at all. My conviction is that if Hunter had received a good 
 general education in early years he would have been all the better 
 for it. He would have lost nothing. His mental powers could have 
 been no way impaired, but, on the contrary, enhanced. He would 
 have recorded the results of his labours in better order, with more 
 light and greater effect ; and we should have had the advantage of 
 a clearer revelation of his thoughts."
 
 44 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 writings, and lias shown to the world both what his 
 theory meant and that it was based on truth. This 
 is pointed out by Abernethy * in regard to his 
 opinions respecting secretion, as well as by many 
 other critics in other instances. 
 
 Hunter also is by no means always logical or con- 
 sistent in his reasoning. Whether be shared the 
 other qualities of his nation or no, he shows little 
 trace of the fondness with which the Scotch are 
 credited for metaphysics, yet much of his specula- 
 tion is really metaphysical. Mr. Buckle, in a well- 
 known section of his work, refers the confusion 
 which he finds in Hunter's theoretical reasoning to 
 a conflict in his mind between two hostile methods, 
 viz. the deductive method, that of reasoning from 
 general principles to particular facts, a method 
 which, he says, is native to Scotland, and which 
 Hunter imbibed with his earliest associations ; and 
 the inductive or Baconian method, of reasoning 
 from particular facts to general principles, which 
 Hunter was taught from his residence in England. 
 " This conflict," says Mr. Buckle, " darkened his 
 understanding." I leave this theory of Buckle's to 
 your judgment — to my own it seems too ingenious 
 to be quite true. But whatever may have been the 
 remote cause, the fact that Hunter is often confused 
 in his method is obvious and undeniable. Again 
 he has a fixed habit of adducing as the cause of any 
 phenomenon he is studying, not what we should 
 
 * ' Phys. Lect.,' p. 174.
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 45 
 
 regard as its cause, i. e. the natural action whicli 
 produces it, but the teleological object which he 
 believes the phenomenon calculated to serve.* 
 Much fault has been found justly enough with 
 Hunter's method for this confusion between efficient 
 and final causes, and many have sneered at his 
 teleological proclivities. This is an old battle- 
 ground between rival metaphysicians. f There are 
 
 * In Abernethy's words, " His unphilosophical language imputes 
 design to unintelligent agency." — (' Phys. Lect.,' p. 79.) 
 
 t Dr. W. Ogle, in his beautiful and profoundly interesting 
 ' Translation of Aristotle on the Parts of Animals ' (Introduction, 
 foot-note, p. ii), gives the following illustration : — " In a remarkable 
 passage (' Phys.,' ii, 8. 4.) Aristotle thus states the materialistic view. 
 * Why, however, it must be asked, should we look on the operations 
 of nature as dictated by a final cause and intended to realise some 
 desirable end ? Why may they not be merely the results of neces- 
 sity, just as the rain falls of necessity, and not that the corn may 
 grow ? Fur the uprising of the watery vapour, its cooling when 
 thus raised, and its fall as rain when cooled, are all matters of 
 necessity ; and though the rain makes the corn grow, it no more 
 occurs in order to cause that growth than a shower which spoils the 
 farmer's crop at hai-vest-time occurs in order to do that mischief. 
 Now, why may not this which is true of the rain be true also of the 
 parts of the body ? Why, for instance, may not the teeth grow to 
 be such as they are merely of necessity, and the fitness of the front 
 ones with their sharp edge for the comminution of the food, and of 
 the hind ones with their flat surface for its mastication, be no more 
 than an accidental coincidence, and not the cause that has deter- 
 mined their development ? And so with all other parts wherever 
 there is an appearance of final causes. In short, whenever accident 
 caused all the parts of the body to be developed spontaneously in 
 this suitable manner, to be developed, that is, just as they would 
 have been had design presided over the formation the resulting 
 wholes survived ; but when this was not the case they perished, 
 and still do perish, as Empedocles insists, when speaking of certain 
 monstrosities.' 
 
 " The explanation suggested in this passage will be found," 
 pursues Dr. Ogle, " recurring in after ages. A similar hypothesis,
 
 46 INTEODUOTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 those who deny all force in the argument from 
 design, and who remain quite unaffected by Paley's 
 celebrated illustration of the watch. In fact it has 
 now become almost a requisite of the highest cul- 
 ture to adopt and put into more elaborate phrase- 
 ology Topsy's simple theory of her origin, " I 'spect 
 I grow'd. Don't think nobody never made me." 
 Yet somehow, in spite of science " entangling itself 
 in overwiseness," in spite of the difficulty of assign- 
 ing uses to parts which have all the appearance of 
 survivals from disused types, and in spite of the 
 still more startling thought that all these elaborate 
 machines are wound up only that they may run 
 down, most people are as firmly teleological as 
 Hunter was, and think that these exquisite arrange- 
 ments were made in order to fulfil the designs 
 for which they are so indubitably fitted. It is a 
 tendency which is inevitable, because it is natural, 
 and natural, I believe, because it is true. Anyhow, 
 Hunter is entirely teleological.* He died too 
 
 for instance, is started in Diderot's ' Letter on the Blind for the 
 use of those who can see,' where it is put in the mouth of the blind 
 Sanderson. The relation in which the hypothesis stands to that of 
 Darwin may be thus expi-essed : the old philosopher insists on the 
 survival of the fit, Darwin on the survival of the fittest. What a 
 vast difference underlies the apparent similarity in the introduction 
 of a single short syllable scarcely needs to be pointed out." 
 
 The whole of this Introduction, where it treats on necessity and 
 teleology, will well repay the reader's perusal and best attention. 
 The great founder of natural science, though admitting the force 
 of the necessitarian argument to some extent, was for all practical 
 purposes a teleologist. 
 
 * Abemethy takes the same view in his comments on Hunter's 
 physiology (see his ' Phys. Lect.,' pp. 70, 151, 153, &c.).
 
 INTEODUOTORY ADDRESS. 47 
 
 soon to have read Paley's ' Natural Theology ' and 
 would have been highly unlikely to read it had he 
 lived ; but if he had read it he would have agreed 
 heartily with its reasoning. 
 
 Hunter's philosophy is throughout entirely 
 natural. He treats of every part of the system 
 of nature, but about things supernatural he 
 neither theorises nor even speaks. His works 
 contain nothing to show whether the biographer is 
 right or wrong who says that he had no feeling of 
 religion. At any rate he wisely saw that the 
 provinces of religion and natural philosophy are 
 perfectly distinct, and that although the works of 
 nature have furnished the wisest of men with 
 cogent evidence of the existence of something 
 higher, yet the operations of nature may be studied 
 and described thoroughly without any theories of 
 the supernatural.* 
 
 The philosophers of the present day are much 
 exercised about heredity. To judge from what 
 some of them say about it one would think that 
 the old commandment had been reversed — for now, 
 instead of visiting the sins of the fathers on the 
 children, we immediately proceed to lay all the 
 faults and failings of the children on their parents 
 
 * " Hunter might with the same breath have consoled the veriest 
 materialist and the most anxious theologian, and have told both 
 that the field of nature is common ground, in which they may dig, 
 and dig fearlessly, together, and that it will yield according to the 
 seed with which it is sown."— (Sir G. Humphry, ' Hunterian Oration,' 
 p. 15.)
 
 48 INTEODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 to the third and fourth generation. We no longer 
 impute our sins to the conjunctions of the planets, 
 as was the fashion in King Lear's day ; " atavism " 
 accounts for all our backslidings ; but the result is 
 the same, that " we are villains by necessity — fools 
 by heavenly compulsion." Without going into 
 these extravagances Hunter occupied himself 
 deeply with heredity. " He used, in his lectures," 
 says Abernethy,* " to record every instance that 
 came within his own knowledge with his usual 
 accuracy and fidelity. He recites instances of 
 children, who had never seen their parents, resem- 
 bling them not only most exactly in form, but also 
 in manners and in peculiar and whimsical habits. 
 He actually wearied his audience by the number of 
 facts he recorded, and the minuteness and accuracy 
 with which he detailed them." 
 
 A curious feature in Hunter's writings is his 
 tendency to personification. " Nature " is with 
 him not so much an expression for the outside 
 world as an artificer engaged in building up or 
 pulling down, or repairing the frame of our bodies. f 
 
 * ' Phys. Lect.,' p. 306. 
 
 t For instance, in describing the post-mortem appearances in a 
 case of suppurative peritonitis in which he had laid open the 
 abdominal cavity to give exit to the pus, he says, " From this view 
 of the case we must see how Nature had guarded all the most 
 essential parts. In the time of the adhesive stage she had covered 
 all the intestines with a coat of coagulating lymph, so as to guard 
 them, and this probably on two principles, one from their being 
 canals, and therefore loth to admit penetration in that way, the 
 other from their being more internal than the parietes of the abdo- 
 men ; one side is therefore thickened for their defence, while the
 
 INTRODUCTOET ADDEESS. 49 
 
 Absorption, again,* he typifies as " the natural 
 surgeon " to whom he attributes intention and a 
 definite and even artistic mode of working ; and so 
 on, in a thousand instances. 
 
 Closely connected with this tendency to personi- 
 fication is the use which Hunter makes of '* stimuli " 
 and " sympathies." Looked at philosophically, per- 
 haps these terms might be said to have little mean- 
 ing — to stand merely as more or less metaphorical 
 re-statements of the facts they are alleged to explain. 
 Yet they serve the attentive reader well. They 
 introduce so many pathological facts, so many 
 practical observations, that we could ill afford to 
 dispense with them. Stimulus is defined by Hunter f 
 as " the immediate cause of action in an animal;" 
 a perfect definition, yet one which might justify 
 his hatred of definitions,}: for it certainly does not fit 
 into his own use of the term. Sometimes that term 
 figures as a veil for our ignorance of the whole 
 matter, as when he says that this or that is produced 
 by the stimulus of necessity, or of nature. Some- 
 times it applies more to the mind than the body, as 
 the stimulus of want or hunger — sometimes it seems 
 
 other is thinned for the relief of the part." — (' On the Blood, &c.,' 
 vol. iii, p. 478.) 
 
 * See the ' Treatise on the Blood, &c.,' part ii, chap, vi, §§ 7, 8, 
 pp. 481, 482. 
 
 t ' Croonian Lectures,' p. 197. 
 
 J " Of all things on the face of the earth definitions are the most 
 cursed, for if you make a definition you may bring together under it 
 a thousand things that have not the least connexion with it."— 
 (' Principles of Surgery,' p. 217.) 
 
 4
 
 50 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 to resolve itself into a mere metaphor, as the stimulus 
 of imperfection.* The strange expression, " the 
 stimulus of death," is due to the error of regarding 
 the rigor mortis as a vital not a lethal change.! 
 And yet, when he uses the term in its natural and 
 true signification, what vivacity and picturesqueness 
 it gives to his exposition, and how plainly it brings 
 out the point to which his reasoning is intended to 
 conduce ! 
 
 And so with sympathies. Much that Hunter 
 says about sympathy is metaphorical merely, much 
 is a re-statement of facts under the guise of ex- 
 planation. Yet some of the most valuable sections 
 on general pathology are those which deal with 
 sympathy — notably the most interesting tenth 
 chapter of the ' Surgical Lectures,' the perusal 
 of which I should be disposed to recommend to one 
 who had not the time " to steep himself " in Hunter, 
 as the best sample of Hunter's style as a writer on 
 surgery. But, after all, with Hunter, as with every 
 great author, "to steep yourself in him" is the 
 only way really to appreciate him. In these days 
 of " abstracts " and " extracts " we have but too 
 
 * He is speaking (cbap. v of the 'Lectures on Surgery') of the 
 absorption of useless parts, and he says, " When the part to be 
 absorbed is alive it must feel its own inefficacy and admit of absoi-p- 
 tion. The vessels must have the stimulus of imperfection of this 
 part, as if they were sensible that this part were unfit, therefore take 
 it up." 
 
 f Green ('Hunterian Oration,' 1840, p. 84) has tried to defend 
 Hunter's use of these terms, but to my apprehension not very 
 successfully.
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 51 
 
 many examples of the old story of the fool who 
 took a brick about as a sample when he wanted to 
 sell his house. 
 
 So far I seem to have spoken rather of the 
 weakness than the strength of Hunter's philoso- 
 phical method. Yet no one can study, or ever has 
 carefully studied, his works without seeing that 
 John Hunter was the author of a completely new 
 method of treating physiology and surgery — a 
 method so strong that it launched the world on a 
 new path in these matters, by an impulse which, 
 far from slackening, has now, after the lapse of a 
 century, assumed the irresistible power of a law of 
 nature. Whence was that strength derived ? 
 Clearly from the conception which underlies all that 
 Hunter wrote, all the aims of his great collection, 
 all the thoughts that were for ever seething in his 
 mind, viz. that surgery, pathology, physiology, 
 natural history, palaeontology, were but different 
 branches — say rather different aspects — of the great 
 science of life ; life as directing organisation, life 
 in all things, great and small, ancient and contem- 
 porary ; life in health and in disease. Ideas like this 
 are so simple that when they have become familiar 
 we are loth to believe in a time when they were 
 otherwise.* But no less is it true that Hunter was 
 
 * And it had been seen before Hunter's time that disease and 
 health are only parts of the same life. Thus Holden quotes from 
 Sydenham, " Disease, however hostile its causes may be to the 
 human body, is nothing else than nature exerting all her strength
 
 52 INTRODTJCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 the first who tried to carry it out into practice, 
 and who not only tried, but succeeded as far as any 
 one man could succeed in his short working life of 
 little more than forty years. This is a service to 
 the whole human race, a revolution in thought such 
 as it is given to only a very few men of the highest 
 genius to originate, and in comparison with which 
 errors in detail or failures in logical method appear 
 as unimportant as are the minute perturbations 
 which interfere with the perfect regularity of a 
 planet's orbit. 
 
 But beside his great achievement, that of start- 
 ing the world on a course of ever-increasing know- 
 ledge and improvement, Hunter made enormous 
 advances by his own unassisted labour.* If you 
 look in Buckle's great work, you will j&nd a long 
 list of the discoveries which are ascribed to 
 him as original. Sir J. Paget more prudently 
 abstains from pronouncing on Hunter's claim to 
 each of these discoveries, for some are contested, 
 and probably some were made about the same time 
 by Hunter and some contemporary (as that of the 
 air-cells in birds' bones by Hunter and Camper), 
 and therefore, as Sir J. Paget says, "it would re- 
 quire a careful study of the literature of the period 
 
 in an effort to destroy morbific material in order to save the sick 
 man." 
 
 * " Bacon, we know, has been compared to Moses on Pisgah 
 surveying the prounsed hind, and Newton to Joshua, who began to 
 take possession of it. But Hunter saw the Canaan of surgery and 
 took possession of it too."— (Savory, ' Hunterian Oration.')
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 53 
 
 to enable one to form a definite opinion on each 
 question," Sir E,. Owen speaks with similar wise 
 caution on this subject in his preface to Hunter's 
 ' Animal CEconomy ' (p. iv), and in his notes to each 
 paper in that work. He truly says that many of 
 Hunter's so-called " discoveries " were so m the 
 sense that " he doubtless did discover (the matter 
 in question) so far as an independent and original 
 research constitutes a claim to that honour," 
 though similar results might, without his know- 
 ledge, have been arrived at independently. But 
 there are many which are incontestable, and they 
 prove that Hunter was by far the greatest physiolo- 
 gist of his time. Then he was much more, for his 
 far-reaching method dealt with life, not only in the 
 present, but in the past ; and his researches in geo- 
 logy and palaeontology carried him far along a road 
 then untrodden, but which since his time has been 
 opened out as one of the main avenues to a know- 
 ledge of the genesis of heaven and earth.* His 
 
 * Travels says, in his ' Hunterian Oration,' " Even of that sub- 
 lime science of these our days, which connects the history of our 
 planet with that of its extinct races, which has based their classifi- 
 cation on the anatomical correspondence and uniformity of design 
 manifest in the organic remains of periods remotely antecedent to 
 the creation of man and the existing types of mortality, it is indis- 
 putable that Hunter had a prophetic vision. For proof of this 
 I may refer not only to his lich fossil collection, including at his 
 decease about 1050 specimens, but to his interesting posthumous 
 paper in Ihe ' Phil. Trans.,' 1794, on the fossil bones found in the 
 caverns of the principality of Bayreuth. In this paper he compares 
 these specimens with their recent analogues . . . alludes to the dif- 
 ferent climates and localities of the globe to which animals are more 
 or less confined, or their geographical distribution, which, con-
 
 64 INTEODUOTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 embryological researches again, led him to the 
 fruitful conception that " organised creation," as 
 the latest Hunterian orator phrases it, "had been 
 formed on a single plan or type, which may be 
 traced through the whole animal world ; and that 
 the lower animals represent permanently the suc- 
 cessive stage;^. through which higher animals pass, 
 until they have attained their full and perfect deve- 
 lopment ; "* an idea which contains within it the 
 germ of the Darwinian philosophy. f 
 
 sidered in relation to fossil remains, elucidates by implication the 
 changes of temperature to which different parts of the earth have 
 been subject at different periods. With more distinctness and 
 detail he points out the evidence which fossils afford of the altera- 
 tions of the conditions of the earth's surface, as dry land or sub- 
 merged ; and by frequent allusions to the many thousand years 
 which must have elapsed since the earth was the theatre of these 
 changes, he seems to have fully appreciated the necessity of an 
 ample allowance of past time to account philosophically for the 
 changes in question. Mr. Clift, who transcribed the MS. of this 
 paper, informs me that it was originally, not ' many thousand years,' 
 but ' many thousand centuries,' and he preserves the copy of the 
 letter of the friend of Hunter (Major Rennell), who advised the 
 change of expression in conformity with the popular notion of the 
 world's age. This interesting paper, if candidly perused, must, I 
 think, be considered as the dawning of that glorious daylight with 
 which fossil anatomy, the handmaid of geology, has since overspread 
 the summits and penetrated the depths, and thus illumined the 
 history of the ' earth and the waters under the earth ! ' " 
 
 * Bryant, ' Hunterian Oration,' p. 31. 
 
 t Mr. Marshall, in his ' Hunte-ian Oration' (pp. 30, 31), 
 brings out in a very interesting way the anticipations of the doc- 
 trines of Darwin which are to be found in Hunter's speculations. 
 " Contrasting," says Mr. Marshall, " the phenomena of variation 
 as they occur in wild and in domesticated animals, to which he 
 obviously paid great attention. Hunter says : ' Animals living in 
 a free and natural state are subject to few deviations fi-om their 
 specific character, but Nature is less uniform in its operations when
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 55 
 
 Hunter was, above all things, an experimental 
 philosopher. He carried his zeal for experiment on 
 
 influenced by culture. Considerable variations are produced under 
 sucb circumstances, of which the most frequent are changes in 
 colour.' In a note he adds: 'From the variations produced by 
 culture it would appear that the animal is so susceptible of im- 
 pressions as to vary Nature's action, and this is even carried into 
 propagation ' (vol. iv, p. 277). Still more striking is a note in which, 
 speaking of extreme variations as monstrous, he reflects : ' Perhaps 
 the word monstrous is too strong or not exactly just ; ' and then 
 he adds this remarkable passage : ' It certainly may be laid down as 
 one of the principles or laws of Nature to deviate under certain 
 circumstances. It may also be observed that it is neither necessary 
 nor does it follow that all deviations from the original must be a 
 falling ofi"; it appears just the contrary ; therefore we may suppose 
 that Nature is improving her works, or at least has established the 
 principle of improvement in the body as well as in the mind ' (vol. iv, 
 pp. 278, 279, note). Given the additional factor of the advantages 
 bestowed upon individuals by such improvements in the ' struggle 
 for existence,' and Hunter would have discerned the Darwinian 
 doctrines of ' modification in descent ' and ' the survival of the 
 Attest.' " 
 
 Mr. Marshall then proceeds to show that Hunter discusses as 
 Darwin did the question of reversion to the original type, that he 
 alludes to the necessary adaptation of some insects to uniform and 
 others to variable climates, and reflects on the difi"erences of habit 
 which must thus be brought about ; that he describes those constant 
 and associated peculiarities and changes in an animal to which 
 Dai'win applied the term " Correlation," and adds that " his paper on 
 the peculiarities of a hen-pheasant which had acquired the plumage 
 of a male, is full of reflections and suggestions conceived in the true 
 Darwinian spirit." It is amusing to remember that it was just this 
 paper which Foot thought too absui'd to waste a word on — so dan- 
 gerous is it to criticise what you cannot understand. 
 
 Again, Mr. Marshall remarks that, like Darwin, Hunter often 
 drew conclusions from the most trivial facts, that he inferred the 
 existence of bile in the maggot from the bitterness of a bad nut, that 
 he examined the excrement of fleas and caterpillars, and speculated 
 therefrom on their digestive powers and habits of feeding, in passages 
 which would have rejoiced the heart of Aristophanes if Socrates had 
 written them, and of which he would have made fun for countless 
 generations to split their sides over. (See Arist., ' Nubes,' 142 — 168.)
 
 56 INTEODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 to tlie field of battle ;* he was experimenting all day 
 and much of the night in his leisure at Earl's Court, 
 in his study at home, in his visits at the hospital ; f 
 he was meditating on his experiments as he sat in 
 his armchair or rode in his carriage ; I he did not 
 spare his own body, as I have shown you, nor did 
 he spare the bodies of his fellow creatures. But I 
 willingly avoid any reference to " the vivisection 
 controversy," and turn to the last of my topics. 
 
 We come now to the greatest of Hunter's works, 
 the great museum, which was the chief occupation 
 of his last thirty years to collect, at which he worked 
 everyday and every night, to which he sacrificed every 
 guinea, as well as every moment that he could spare ; 
 which was intended to embody, to be the visible pre- 
 sentment of, the theory of the action of life in health 
 and disease, that he had formed with such infinite 
 labour and such indomitable perseverance. Well, 
 indeed, does Abernethy (' Phys. Lect.,' p 27) call it 
 " the great labour of his life — the principal record 
 
 * " To be still more certain of tlie nature of what these vesiculse 
 contain than was possible from the examination of bodies which had 
 been dead some time I took an opportunity of opening a man 
 immediately after his death who had been killed by a cannon-ball." 
 — (' On the Glands called Yesiculae seminales,' vol. iv, p. 21.) 
 
 t He infen-ed the passage of air through animal membranes 
 partly from some experiments perfjrmed by him when house 
 surgeon at St. George's. — (' Treatise on the Blood,' &c., vol. iii, 
 p. 84.) 
 
 X I have often devised experiments by the fireside or in my 
 carriage, and have also conceived the result ; but when I tried the 
 experiment the result was diffei'ent, or I found that the experiment 
 could not be attended with all the circumstances that were sug- 
 gested." — ' Observations on Bees,' vol. iv, p. 424.
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 57 
 
 of his deeds and opinions." To this chief object 
 all the other parts of his life were subordinate. 
 He was, as we have seen, a great surgeon, yet prac- 
 tice always was with him secondary to his researches. 
 He constantly complained of the interruption to his 
 studies caused by the necessity of earning the 
 means for carrying them on. He was a great 
 anatomist, but he has told us in his own simple 
 way how good it was for him that he never devoted 
 himself to anatomical teaching, " as the necessity 
 I should have been under to read might have occu- 
 pied me too much and prevented my forming habits 
 or established modes of thinking."* He was a great 
 pathologist, but pathology was, after all, only one 
 of the departments, and that one of the smaller, of 
 the great science of life which it was his grand aim 
 to found; and hence the pathological specimens, 
 though numerous and important, are but a small 
 minority of the contents of the museum. f Again, 
 Hunter was a great zoologist, and the bulk of his 
 
 * ' Lectures on Surgery,' p. 210. He used anatomy as anatomy 
 ought to be used, as the handmaid of physiology. " When," says 
 Abernethy (' Phys. Lect.,' p. 58), " he met with an animal he had 
 never dissected he cared little by what name it was called, to what 
 family it belonged, with what others it was associated, either by 
 natural or artificial ties. He chiefly wished to know how its food 
 was digested, how its blood circulated, how it respired, what were 
 its feelings, instincts, and habits, how it secured or defended itself 
 from injury, how the multiplication of its species was effected and 
 insured." 
 
 t In fact, there were 1084 pathological preparations in spirit, and 
 625 dry preparations, out of 14,000. The preparations of fossils 
 were, as we shall see, far more numerous [vide foot-note, p. 64).
 
 58 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 preparations are in the Department of Comparative 
 Anatomy, but comparative anatomy was used by him 
 only to illustrate, or rather to form part of the founda- 
 tion of, biology, the science of life in its widest sense 
 and in its most extended relations, the philosophy of 
 the whole of animated nature.* What preparation he 
 made for this stupendous task — a task which in its 
 perfect accomplishment is literally superhuman — 
 may be judged of by the fact that his collection em- 
 braced some 14,000 specimens, accompanied by ten 
 folio volumes of MS. notes, by catalogues of certain 
 portions of the physiological department, and a 
 description of the pathological specimens of diseases 
 of the bones, besides an immense number of draw- 
 
 * Sii" W. Savory says of the physiological part of the museum : — 
 " Above all, it introduces us, in the happiest way, to the study of 
 comparative physiology. It demonstrates the great law of progress 
 from the general to the special ; the law of evolution from the 
 simple to the complex ; the principle of elaboration and advancement 
 of function by division of labour. Or, again, as Sir W. Flower 
 puts it, it throws 'light upon one of the great biological problems, 
 classification, which, when rightly interpreted, means nothing more 
 or less than a statement of the oi'der in which living beings have 
 been evolved from one another,' I know not, indeed, whether 
 Hunter ever formulated this idea. . . . But then hasty gene- 
 ralisation was no habit of his mind. . . . When his labour 
 ceased he was working out the great idea. But by such glimpses 
 as we thus obtain of the character of his mind and the method of 
 his inquiry, of the way of his genius to begin the search for the 
 truths he sought at the furthest outposts, and from thence, so to 
 speak, to work inward and upward — I cannot regard the possession 
 of any facts and illustrations, which he was enabled to collect, but 
 had not time to place, as wanton or pui-poseless, or even merely 
 curious. To me, it is wonderful, but withal most suggestive, that 
 the great mind of Hunter was not only far in advance of his 
 own age, but is hardly overtaken by this." (' Hunterian Oi'ation,' 
 pp. 8, 9.)
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 59 
 
 ings, chiefly by William Bell. Sir E. Owen tells us 
 that Hunter left original records of the dissection 
 of 315 different species of animals, and preparations 
 of nearly 200 others, so that he had dissected 
 animals of over 500 different species, besides his 
 preparations in human anatomy and pathology, those 
 which illustrate health and disease in plants,* and 
 his geological and palseonto logical specimens. We 
 may safely say that no man since the world began 
 has ever left so splendid a monument of well-directed 
 and skilful labour. For Hunter was no bung-ler and 
 no dilettante. He was a most accomplished dis- 
 sector,t and as a natural philosopher he knew, as few 
 men have ever known, the aim, the central point of 
 his theories, and therefore, to what end his labour 
 should be directed, and from that he never swerved. 
 That point was to show how life worked in all ani- 
 mated nature, how it had worked in times past in 
 building up this universe, how it was affected by 
 cosmical conditions, by injury, and by disease. 
 
 It almost makes one shudder to think how easily 
 the great result of all this genius and labour might 
 have perished. Had Hunter's museum been dissi- 
 pated among the few anatomists and surgeons who 
 might have chosen to purchase the more striking 
 
 * For an interesting resume of Hunter's researches in the vege- 
 table kingdom see Abernetliy, ' Phys. Lect.,' pp. 62 et seq. 
 
 f Mr. Power says in his ' Hunterian Oration,' "The museum 
 proves that he possessed dexterity of manipulation in perfection, 
 and such specimens as those I now show might be pitted for 
 delicacy of dissection against those of any other anatomist."
 
 60 INTRODDOTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 specimens, or, what is just as likely, been allowed to 
 fall into decay,* I doubt whether we should at 
 this day have known much of John Hunter, or 
 valued him much more highly than his elder brother. 
 I cannot honestly join in the sneers at Pitt's 
 reluctance to purchase this collection, or at his 
 answer when urged to do so, " What ! buy prepara- 
 tions ! Why, I have not money enough to purchase 
 gunpowder ! " We must recollect the circumstances 
 of that critical period in the history of Great Britain. 
 Hunter died on October 16th, 1793, the very day of 
 the judicial murder of Marie Antoinette. A few 
 months earlier the violence and aggression of the 
 French revolutionary leaders had driven them to de- 
 clare war against Great Britain, and thus Pitt, sorely 
 against his will, was forced into a war, the magni- 
 tude and duration of which became more evident as 
 the months rolled on, and which, in fact, never came 
 to any final conclusion till the battle of Waterloo, 
 more than twenty years afterwards. Surely in 
 embarking on so gigantic a struggle — a struggle 
 not for sugar islands or naval prerogative, but 
 for national independence and even national exist- 
 ence — " gunpowder " (if by that is meant the means 
 of war) was the first requisite the Minister had to 
 
 * Hunter's will directed that the collection should first be oflFered 
 to the British Government, and if declined by them to some foreign 
 country. If not sold to any State it was to be disposed of in one 
 lot if possible. But it is obvious that its being refused by the 
 British Government would seriously damage its chance of sale to 
 any public authority, while few private persons could even keep up 
 such a collection.
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 61 
 
 provide. We must recollect also that tlie value of 
 the collection was so far from obvious to statesmen 
 that even so distinguished a naturalist and so warm 
 a friend of Hunter as Banks thought of it as not 
 " an object of importance to the general study of 
 natural history, or indeed to any branch of science 
 except that of medicine." * Had it not been for 
 Lord Auckland's powerful advocacy there is no 
 doubt that the transaction would have fallen 
 through — and that advocacy was based of course on 
 personal friendship, not on any knowledge of the 
 treasure thus secured to the nation. How differ- 
 ently do we now view the Hunterian museum. It 
 is, indeed, thanks to the liberal and wise manage- 
 ment of it by the College, in a very different condi- 
 tion from that in which its great author left it. 
 And this is one of Hunter's great glories. Kich as 
 are the treasures of wisdom and knowledge which 
 he himself gave to men, they are poor in comparison 
 with the method which he initiated, and by following 
 which his successors have endowed the world with 
 
 * Ottley's ' Life,' p. 141. So again, Abernethy says that Ouvier 
 " declared that lie knew not that there was such a collection as the 
 Hunterian museum." It was perhaps better known to Hunter's 
 own professional friends, for we are told by Sir R, Owen that in 
 1787, " when he had brought his museum to an approximate degree of 
 perfection, he then set apart certain days in which he exhibited and 
 explained to some chosen minds, which could respond to the concep- 
 tions of his own, his great scheme, embracing the demonstration of 
 all the leading modifications of every organ of the animal body, 
 and of the different stages which each organ undergoes in its deve- 
 lopment to fulfil the functions it is required to perform in the 
 highest organisms." — (Preface, p. xxxviii.)
 
 6^ INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 SO much wider a biology, and so much truer and 
 more progressive an art of medicine. So with the 
 museum. It now contains far more than the 
 number of preparations left by Hunter ; it is ar- 
 ranged on a plan which he himself indicated,* and 
 which would have rejoiced his heart — it is the most 
 magnificent instrument for the study of nature 
 which exists in the world, and is one of the glories 
 of the nation and of the city which possesses it. 
 But though the greater part of the Hunterian 
 Museum is in one sense not the handiwork of 
 Hunter, the whole is so in a far higher sense — for 
 it is by merely following his initiative that men, far 
 inferior to him in genius, have built up this grand 
 national monument. Many of the largest depart- 
 ments are merely expansions or continuations of 
 the series which Hunter began. f Thus the ethno- 
 logical collection of crania, which has taken such 
 
 * " The simplicity of his object," says Abernethy (' Phys. Lect.,' 
 p. 10), " induced an almost equal simplicity of arrangement. The 
 facts are displayed in his museum according to the order of the 
 vital processes." 
 
 t Holden (' Hunterian Oration,' 1881, p. 31) says as to the Hun- 
 terian Museum : " If he could enter it, after an absence from the 
 earth of eighty-seven years, I do not know whether he would be more 
 pleased at finding it so little altered, or at its having been so much 
 enlarged. It is true that one section — that of stuffed birds — has 
 disappeared altogether. It is true that some sections have been so 
 much enlarged that he would hardly recognise them. There are 
 3000 specimens of skulls in the place of his 50, and his pathological 
 specimens have been more than doubled. But in the series of 
 comparative physiology, on which he bestowed the most pains, he 
 would see the very materials which he gathered with his own hands 
 to lay the broad foundations of his new science still in the same 
 order in which he placed thera ; he would see his own ari'angement
 
 INTRODUCTOEY ADDRESS. 63 
 
 great proportions in our day, was commenced by 
 Hunter when " he collected the heads of persons of 
 different nations,* and this collection of crania 
 was merely one step in working out the general 
 problem of the proportion of the cranium to the 
 face in the descending scale of animal intelligence 
 
 rigidly adhered to in every detail, and bis own specimens still out- 
 numbering the additions of a century." 
 
 It is possible that this statement (made a dozen years ago) may 
 now require some modification. It is impossible to give an accurate 
 account of the total number of preparations in a museum which 
 receives daily additions, but Prof. Stewart has been so kind as to 
 furnish me with the following summaries of the original collection 
 of Hunter, and of the museum as it existed at the College in 1887. 
 In comparing these two collections it should be recollected that a 
 large number of Hunter's original specimens have by the lapse of 
 time become spoiled, and have been replaced under the direction of 
 the Museum Committee by other similar ones, known as " Hunterian 
 Substitutes." It should also be added that in place of Hunter's 
 215 microscopical preparations (of course of a very simple character) 
 the College museum now contains many thousands, which are not 
 reckoned in the annexed summary ; that the collection of calculi has 
 been supplemented by the gift of 1000 pi-eparations from one dis- 
 tinguished surgeon, and that the regular yearly additions to the 
 museum may be taken at not less than 250. The pathological 
 specimens, it will be seen, are more than quintupled. 
 
 I should also add that the Hunterian specimens (1968 in number) 
 which are classed as " zoological," and which show only the outward 
 forms of animals, though they still exist at Lincoln's Inn Fields, 
 are no longer exhibited, since the present museum is strictly ana- 
 tomical, and the grand zoological collection of the British Museum 
 renders it unnecessai-y now to display them. This fact accounts 
 for Mr. Holden's statement as to the stuffed birds. 
 
 I cannot account for Travers's statement, quoted on p. 53, that the 
 collection of fossils included at Hunter's death about 1050 speci- 
 mens, except by supposing that he was misinformed, and did not 
 verify the statement given him. Table A is taken from the College 
 Calendar, and would give the number of fossil specimens as 3709 ; 
 yet this again appears erroneous, and the real numbers appeared 
 
 * Abernethy, ' Phys. Lect.,' p. 83.
 
 64 
 
 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
 
 — a problem which so interested Sir J. Reynolds 
 that he introduced into Hunter's portrait that page 
 of his portfolio where this descending series is 
 sketched.* " That fine portrait of his counte- 
 nance," says S. Cooper in his ' Hunterian Oration,' 
 " made Lavater exclaim when he saw it, ' That man 
 
 to Prof. Stewart and myself (fi-om the Catalogues) to be : Vertebrata 
 681, Invertebrata 2092, Plants 199— total 2972. 
 
 A. Summary of Hunter's preparations. 
 
 
 Physiological, in spirit . . . 3745 
 
 Osteological preparations 
 
 
 965 
 
 Dry preparations 
 
 
 617 
 
 Zoological 
 
 
 . 1968 
 
 Fossils : 
 
 
 
 Vert. 
 
 
 . 1215 
 
 Invert. 
 
 
 . 2202 
 
 Plants . 
 
 
 292 
 
 Pathological, in spirit , 
 
 
 1084 
 
 Dry preparations 
 
 
 625 
 
 Calculi 
 
 
 536 
 
 Malformations 
 
 
 218 
 
 Microscopic . 
 
 
 215 
 
 
 13,682 
 
 B. In 1887 there were in the museum the following specimens, viz. 
 
 Physiological .... 7584 
 
 Pathological . 
 
 
 5650 
 
 Comp. ost. 
 
 
 4278 
 
 Human ost. . 
 
 
 3420 
 
 Invertebrata (special seiies) 
 
 
 1115 
 
 Teratological . 
 
 
 669 
 
 Entozoa 
 
 
 207 
 
 Dermatology . 
 
 
 589 
 
 Calculi 
 
 
 1965 
 
 Diseases of ear 
 
 
 856 
 
 Diseases of eye 
 
 
 194 
 
 
 26,527 
 
 * Ibid., p. 85. 
 

 
 INTRODTJCTOEY ADDRESS. 65 
 
 thinks for himself.' " No man certainly ever more 
 thoroughly deserved that praise. 
 
 Well, gentlemen, I have exhausted my time and 
 I fear your patience, yet I have given you a most 
 imperfect sketch of my subject, and have left quite 
 untouched one of the most interesting parts of my 
 theme. I had hoped, following Green and his master, 
 Coleridge, to have tried to show how Hunter's phi- 
 losophy of nature may be connected with that higher 
 philosophy which treats of man's place in nature and 
 his relations to the great origin of nature who is 
 " to us invisible or dimly seen in these His lowest 
 works." But this I must leave aside.* My task will 
 have been well accomplished, and your time not ill 
 spent, if I have persuaded some of you not to rest 
 content with the vague acquaintance with Hunter 
 which is all that most possess, but to know for your- 
 selves what manner of man he was who laid the 
 foundation of scientific surgery and who was the 
 founder of the school of surgery here. Still better 
 would it be if that study should lead you to imitate 
 him in his single love of truth, his simple and sublime 
 disregard of worldly rewards, his determination to 
 base all his opinions and all his practice on honest 
 and patient observation of nature. If you do this, 
 each one of you, far as he may be from Hunter's 
 piercing intuition or his unwearied energy, will have 
 earned the praise of having been a good son of St. 
 George's and a worthy follower of John Hunter. 
 
 * See, however, the annexed Appendix. 
 
 5
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 After the deliveiy of the preceding address I was asked to 
 make an attempt to complete the task which in its closing words 
 I had excused myself from taking np, viz. to discuss the higher 
 aspects of Hunter's philosophy, and the opinions on this subject 
 entertained by Green and Coleridge. I could not refuse, for the 
 subject is otherwise left incomplete, and although I have not 
 myself the technical knowledge which a man ought to possess 
 who aspires to follow the reasoning of such eminent meta- 
 physicians, still they (or at least Green, if not his master) wrote 
 for men like ourselves — students of Hunter and of nature — 
 rather than metaj^hysicians ; and what they professed to derive 
 from Hunter's philosophy was intended to be intelligible to 
 ordinary men, and to lead them towards truths of universal 
 application. However much, then, I may myself bungle in 
 trying to explain the higher relations of Hunter's philosophy of 
 life, I ti'ust I may set some more acute minds thinking on the 
 subject, and may obtain the reader's indulgence if he cannot give 
 me his approbation. 
 
 Let us first inquire how Hunter's theory was accepted by his 
 own scholars. This, I think, may be seen from Chevalier's 
 Oration (1821), of which Paget (in his own ' Hunterian Oration') 
 says, " I think that the clearest statement of his doctrine by any 
 of his own pupils is that by Chevalier." 
 
 Its most important parts are as follows : — " He soon felt the 
 necessity of studying living actions in themselves. He saw that 
 all other known poAvers were incompetent to account either for the
 
 APPENDIX. 67 
 
 subsistence or the agencies of a living body ; that a more 
 accurate cognisance ought to be taken of that principle or 
 power which, as he expresses it, ' preserves the body from 
 dissolution with or without action, and is the cause of all its 
 
 actions.' His eye was continually directed, undazzled 
 
 by hypotheses of any description, to vital operations. This, he 
 says, was ' always his favourite business and amusement ' 
 (' Obs. on the An. (Economy ') 
 
 " I think it is to be regretted, when the idea Mr. Hunter has 
 given of the principle of life is objected to as metaphysical. If 
 we take for metaphysics that art of subtilising abstracted and 
 gratuitous distinctions in which the schoolmen indulged, 
 , . . . then nothing can less deserve to be called meta- 
 physical than Mr. Hunter's statements. Indeed he does not 
 seem to have possessed an excursive imagination.* .... 
 
 " The organisation was tirst completed, and life afterwards 
 bestowed as a power or principle, by which the original indi- 
 viduals should be, for a time, preserved in their destined states 
 of action ; and which should ensure a succession of races of 
 beings of like form and nature to themselves, and to be pro- 
 duced by them, each engendering its own kind only 
 
 It depends on no particular quantity of matter, but is as entire 
 and unconfused in the minutest animalcule as in an elephant 
 or whale. It is in all cases intended to constitute and to main- 
 tain individuality of kind in the mass which it occupies, and 
 when it is rendered incompetent to this end it is always 
 evanescent, and soon leaves the matter over which it has 
 exercised its dominion open to the decompounding operation of 
 surrounding agents, from which, pending that dominion, it 
 
 afforded a competent protection The attractions 
 
 of cohesion, gravitation, and chemical affinity, electricity 
 and the mechanical powers, may be distinctly recognised as 
 taking part in its operations, but all as coadjutors only, 
 
 * " His mind was naturally formed for investigation, and that turn 
 displayed itself on the most trivial occasions and always with mathe- 
 matical exactness. What is carious, it fatigued him to be long in a 
 mixed company which did not admit of connected conversation, 
 more particularly during the last ten years of his life." — (Sir E. 
 Home, ' Life of Hunter,' p. Ixv.)
 
 68 APPENDIX. 
 
 neither of them as the directors of the whole ; either 
 of them in excess may overpower and extinguish it, but 
 when it is once lost not any of them can reproduce it, nor 
 can it ever be restored, but by a special interposition of 
 the same creative power which first ordained and allotted its 
 
 existence 
 
 " Having thus noted the peculiar agent or active principle by 
 which the body is constructed and actuated, Mr. Hunter's 
 attention was next directed to the material which it compounds 
 and employs, in order to effectuate its purposes ; which pur- 
 poses, he observes, are reducible to two heads, the support of 
 the matter of the body and the support of its different actions. 
 He therefore carefully examined the component parts of the 
 blood, its material and vital properties .... and the reci- 
 procal influences of the circulation, digestion, and resj^iration 
 upon each other. . . . He watched its movements from the 
 pundum saliens in the incubated egg to its various meanderings 
 and influxes through the complicated intertextures and com- 
 munications of arteries and veins, sinuses and cells in the 
 sanguiferous system of perfect animals. . . . Then he in- 
 vestigated the construction, reciprocal adaptations, and distri- 
 butions of the different parts of the vascular, absorbent, and 
 nervous systems and their functional connections with each 
 other. And, having laid this broad and substantial foundation 
 for the consideration of his subject, he proceeded to an experi- 
 mental examination of inflammation, its various kinds, degrees, 
 and circumstances as the disordered action of these living ves- 
 sels, the carriers and distributors of this living blood .... 
 the changes it produces in parts of eveiy structure and every 
 function .... and the natux-e of the effusions, secretions, 
 and deposits arising from it ; the concomitant and subsequent 
 action of the absorbent vessels, ar> i the states of the nervous 
 system under these varied circumstances ; and from the whole 
 he deduced those principles respecting its treatment which this 
 extended survey of facts and the known properties of remedies 
 would indicate and justify. These principles he put to the best 
 possible test by an apjilication of them to the management of 
 gun-shot wounds, in which every order of parts in the body 
 comes occasionally under exposure and review in all the varie-
 
 APPENDIX. 69 
 
 ties, progressions, and terminations of inflammation. He then 
 felt himself authorised to apply the same principles, and the 
 line of conduct suggested by them, to inflammation as it occurs 
 in adjunction to other injuries and diseases and operations. 
 
 He entered largely into the subject of irritability, 
 
 both natural and morbid, pointing out the distinction between 
 this property and power. He noted the different sympathies 
 and orders of parts, and their respective shares in the functions 
 of health and in the transmission of disease 
 
 " His observation of the unputrescent state of eggs in the 
 advanced stages of successful incubation first led him to 
 discriminate betwixt life, as a power, and organisation, as the 
 mere mechanism by which it operates." — (Chevalier, * Hunterian 
 Oration,' 1821.) 
 
 Hunter's work, then, was interpreted by one of his scholars 
 as an attempt to exhibit life, or " the living principle " as he 
 called it, in action. Life, as he justly and profoundly says, is 
 not only not the same thing as organisation, but it is independ- 
 ent of and prior to organisation, which indeed must be sus- 
 tained and repaired by it. Its existence is ordained and 
 allotted by creative power. But Hunter was too cautious a 
 philosopher to attempt the impossible task of constructing a 
 theory of life. " Life," he says,* " is a property we do not 
 understand ; we can only see the necessary steps leading to it." 
 His aim was not to theorise about the essential nature of life, 
 but to exhibit life in action, and to theorise about its processes 
 so far as he had facts on which to build theory ; for Hunter, 
 though the most speculative of men, always tried to base his 
 speculations on observation. It is true that sometimes his 
 vivid intuition would anticipate the conclusions which ought to 
 have been matter of induction, and that Babington f had some 
 reason for saying that sometimes at least " he sought to arrive 
 at the general laws of nature at once by conjecture, rather than 
 by a close and detailed study of her inferior oj)erations, to ascend 
 step by step, through a slow and gradual induction, to those 
 laws which govern her general procedure." The criticism is 
 just if applied to portions, and those I think exceptional por- 
 
 * ' The Blood,' p. 117. 
 
 t Preface to ' Hunter on Venereal Disease,' Works, ii, 129.
 
 70 APPENDIX. 
 
 tions of his work ; it may be applicable to the treatise on the 
 Venereal disease, and possibly Babington meant it only to be so 
 taken. If he meant to speak of Hunter's work as a whole it is 
 unjust.* No man ever tried more earnestly to ascend, step by 
 step, through a slow and gradual induction, to his general con- 
 clusions — and if he did not entirely succeed it was, at any rate, 
 partly the result of necessity — one man's life was too short ; 
 partly again, no doubt, it was due to want of early training in 
 philosophy or metaphysics, so that his method of reasoning is 
 often glaringly defective f — and doubtless he often anticijjated 
 
 * Abernetliy says (' Phys. Lect.,' p. 19) : " At an early period he 
 conceived those notions of life which were confirmed by his future 
 inquiries and experiments. He began his observations on the 
 incubated egg in the year 1755, which must either have suggested 
 or corroborated all his opinions with regard to the cause of the vital 
 phenomena. He perceived that, however diflFerent in form and 
 faculty, every creature was nevertheless allied to himself, because it 
 was a living being ; and therefore he became solicitous to inquire how 
 the vital processes were carried on in all the varieties of animal and 
 even of vegetable existence. . . . Whether truth be discovered 
 by that penetrating foresight which is characteristic of genius, or 
 ascertained by the more laborious methods of experiment and 
 induction, still, when it is once found, each succeeding observation 
 serves but to convince us of its nature and reality. No one could 
 be more scrupulous in admitting propositions to be proved than 
 Mr. Hunter ; yet he was convinced that his opinions respecting life 
 were true, by a course of patient and persevering meditation on all 
 its phenomena." 
 
 t I can conceive no more inappropriate pi'aise than Abernethy's 
 in his ' Hunterian Oration.' " In his reasonings I can perceive 
 no inference deduced from insufficient or irrevelant pi-emises." 
 Le Gros Clark says (' Hunterian Oration,' p. 21) : " In speaking of 
 accuracy as characterising all that Hunter did, I mean that he was 
 scrupulously accurate in his facts d"awn from actual observation; 
 but we find in his writings examples of a form of inaccuracy that is 
 probably due in a measure to defective training, but is also evidence 
 of an amount of self-reliance which induced him to treat sometimes 
 with unmerited indifference the opinions and researches of others." 
 Mr. Clark adduces, as an instance, that passage in the first chapter 
 of his ' Lectures on the Principles of Surgei-y ' in which he is 
 arguing that life is not the same as either chemical action or
 
 APPENDIX. 71 
 
 conclusions or assumed them as self evident — but these latter 
 were the exceptions, not the rule. It was just these very " infe- 
 rior operations " of nature which he spent long years in inves- 
 tigating. I may refer to Sir J, Paget's * account of the way in 
 which he studied the development of the young bird within the 
 egg, night and day, hour by hour, for parts of fifteen years. 
 " Surely," says Paget, " one might suppose this was the great 
 work of his life. Yet it seems to have been rather a casual by- 
 the-way pursuit." " In his experiments on bees, he says, he 
 killed several hives and examined every single bee, to assure 
 himself that no male was left after the fertilisation of the 
 queen bee had been effected. Now the number of labourers 
 in a hive amounts to at least 4,000, so that he must have 
 examined twelve or fifteen thousand bees one by one, to deter- 
 mine this point alone." f So in his experiments on such a 
 minute matter as the motions of the leaves of sensitive plants 
 we read : J "To have the greatest p>art of the day before me I 
 began my experiments at eight in the morning, while the 
 leaves were in full expansion, and I continued them till four in 
 the afternoon, as longer than this would not have been just, for 
 they begin to collapse of themselves between five and six o'clock." 
 And be brought the same thoroughness into all his work. Read 
 the * Treatise on the Blood ' and see how carefully be builds up 
 his theory of the life of the blood from the minutest observation 
 of its structure and of its behaviour in life and death, in health 
 
 fermentation, and so far there can be no doubt he is right. " No 
 chemist on earth," as he truly says, " can make out of the earth a 
 piece of sugar, but a vegetable can do it." But from this perfectly 
 correct premise he goes on to exclude fermentation (which he defines 
 very inaccurately) and chemical action from the operations of 
 life. This, no doubt, is a gross inaccuracy, in excuse for which, 
 however, we must recollect, as Osesar Hawkins says (' Hunterian 
 Oration,' p. 11), that Hunter was here combating the extravagances 
 of the chemical and mechanical physiology of the day. But this 
 and most of the errors we meet with in his theories are in specula- 
 tive matters. Had he followed them into practice he would have 
 found that they led him wrong, and would have abandoned them. 
 
 * Paget, ' Hunterian Oration,' p. 11. 
 
 t Power, ' Hunterian Oration,' p. 28.
 
 72 APtENDlX. 
 
 and disease.* Take the surgical lectures and see how he intro- 
 duces the subject of surgery with a profound study of the 
 properties not only of animated but of unanimated nature. 
 And it is thus that he made not surgery only but the whole 
 medical art scientific, and rescued it out of the bands of the 
 ordinary practical men, who would have left it for ever a mere 
 empirical and traditionary calling. It was just on account of 
 
 * Much has been said and written about Hunter's theory of the blood 
 having life ; some appear even to think that the opinion is an original 
 one of Hunter. But whether Hunter knew or did not know what had 
 been written before (and he certainly does not refer to it), everyone now 
 knows that Harvey asserts the doctrine of the living principle of the 
 blood as plainly as Hunter himself, and professes to be only following 
 Aristotle (see the passages quoted in Palmer's edition, vol. iii, foot- 
 note, p. 105), while the doctrine in its popular form that the blood is 
 the life of the body is as old as the book of Genesis. Harvey, however, 
 did not pursue his researches further. " Hunter, on the contrary," 
 says Sir R. Owen (Owen's preface, p. xii), " carries a series of calm 
 and philosophical investigations on the vital properties of the blood 
 to an extent which has never been surpassed ; he examines it under 
 evei'y condition, both in the vessels and out of the vessels, during 
 circulation and at rest, in health and in disease. He aims to esta- 
 blish the period in its formation at which it manifests the vital 
 properties ; and he fully details the changes which it undergoes, 
 and the phenomena which supervene in the rest of the organism 
 when these properties are lost. Lastly he tells us how the blood, 
 by means of its vital properties, assists in the restoration of parts 
 when injured or diseased." 
 
 But though not new the doctrine was of the greatest importance 
 to Hunter's theory of life. " That the blood has life," he says, 
 (' Treatise on the Blood,' &c., part 1, chapter 1, § 6), is an opinion I 
 have started for above thirty years, and have taught it for nearly twenty 
 of that time in my lectures." And it seems certain that the general 
 opinion in that day attributed life only to what they called " the 
 solids " (regardless of the fact that in living beings the most solid- 
 looking parts are in great measure composed of fluid), while Hunter 
 saw clearly that life was altogether independent of, and anterior to, 
 organisation, and that the living principle would enable the yolk 
 and white of incubated eggs, which could not even be regarded as 
 definitely organised, to resist putrefaction (see the section above 
 quoted. Also Abornethy's ' Phys. liCCt.,' p. 239).
 
 Appendix. 73 
 
 this laborious study of nature that surgery in Hunter's hands 
 touches on so many branches of natural philosophy, or perhaps 
 I should not say " surgery " but " physic " — the great healing 
 art, of which surgery is but one branch. Travers says : * " When 
 I claim him as the father of modern surgery I am far from 
 meaning to imply that our brethren the physicians have no part 
 or lot in him. . . . ' Pardon me,' says one of the most 
 enlightened of their body, Dr. Latham, ' if I hold that Hunter 
 was only nominally a surgeon — he belonged to no isolated 
 district of our profession.' " This is, no doubt, true, for though, 
 happily for sui'gery, Huuter's practice was confined to that one 
 branch, his principles were laid deep in nature, and were there- 
 fore peculiarly adapted to serve as the foundation of that noble 
 art which, by a happy and exceptional use of language, we 
 English, alone of civilised nations, call " physic." 
 
 I do not know that we can state the case better than Green 
 has done. " Invaluable as his researches were, and most happy 
 as their effects have been in the especial improvement and 
 increased light, power, and courage of surgery, may we not 
 rather say that he achieved the more important service of 
 bringing the whole art of healing into an immediate connection 
 with the sciences which have nature for their object, by exhibit- 
 ing its requisite foundation on an enlightened physiology." f 
 
 One of the most philosophic minds which have ever applied 
 themselves to the study of our profession was that of Joseph 
 Henry Green, the friend and disciple of Coleridge. He has 
 pointed outj that the Hunterian Museum may be looked on in 
 an even higher light than as a guide to the study of the works 
 of nature : that the splendid demonstration which it furnishes of 
 the stages of evolution, or, as Green puts it, " that every organic 
 whole, from the polype up to man, indicates a higher and more 
 effective principle of unity," and the striking witness which it 
 bears " that every organic whole is the result of an antecedent 
 principle or power" lead to the almost irresistible conclusion 
 that " nature must not only feel, she must know, her own 
 being ; that is, mind must be superadded to life." And he 
 
 * ' Hunterian Oration,' 1838. 
 
 t Green, ' Hunterian Oration,' 1840, p. 44.
 
 74 APPENDIX. 
 
 points out how plainly John Hunter's labours appear to have 
 tended to this goal, viz. to show us that the object of the 
 history of nature is to serve " as a preface and portion of the 
 history of man, and the knowledge of nature as a branch of self 
 knowledge, and the outwardly realised history of our oAvn 
 consciousness and conscious being " so that " every part of the 
 creation derives its intelligibility from the final purpose revealed 
 in earth's noblest creature — as asj^iring heavenward — Man." 
 
 In another place * Green says : " Take any outward fact or 
 phenomenon of sensible experience — say an organised being — we 
 note its form and changes ; but we ask inevitably what has 
 produced this complex being, and what preserves it, ever the 
 same amid its changing phases ? The only answer is, somewhat 
 beyond the power of our cognisance by the senses, and we infer 
 a somewhat deej^er and beyond the surface — call it life, spirit, 
 law." And he goes on to argue that the support for this con- 
 clusion is derived from our own self consciousness, from the 
 fact that " within ourselves we become cognisant of a causative, 
 an originative, of a somewhat deeper and beyond that which is 
 the object of our thoughts ; — it is the subject, the Will." 
 
 Thus the Hunterian doctrine of life as the cause of organi- 
 sation leads up in Green's hands to the conception of man as a 
 self-conscious and voluntary agent, and " the same principles, 
 derived fi'oni the facts of his consciousness, enable him in the 
 same manner to contemplate the causes and laws which are 
 operative in outward nature, and lead him to the prime cause 
 of the moral order and unity of the universe " (p. 55). 
 
 It was his insight into this meaning lying hid in Hunter's 
 work which powerfully attracted Coleridge towards a character 
 so utterly unlike his own as Hunter's was.f Sjjeaking of 
 Blumenbach's term " Bildungstrieb " or " nisus formativus," he 
 says that it is the equivalent of the " life " or " living principle " 
 of John Hunter, " the profoundest, I had almost said the only, 
 physiological philosopher of the latter half of the preceding 
 century. For in what other seuse can we understand either his 
 assertion that this principle or agent is independent of organi- 
 sation which yet it animates, sustains, and repairs, or the purport 
 
 * " Mental Dynamics," ' Hunterian Oration,' 1847, p. 53. 
 t See ' The Friend,' sect, ii. Essay ix.
 
 APPtiNDlX. 75 
 
 of that magnificent commentary on his system — the Hunterian 
 Museum. The Hunterian idea of a life or vital principle 
 independent of the organisation, yet in each organ working 
 instinctively towards its preservation ... is a genuine 
 philosophic idea. . . . 
 
 " Is not the progressive enlargement, the boldness without 
 temerity of chirurgical views and chirurgical practice since 
 Hunter's time to the present day, attributable in almost every 
 instance to his substitution of what may perhaps be called 
 experimental dynamics for the mechanical notions or the less 
 injurious traditional empiricism of his predecessors." 
 
 And besides these two eminent writers, we may be sure that 
 as all reverent and sincere study of nature has always connected 
 itself with the origin of nature, so Hunter's philosophy has 
 stimulated many of his hearers a.nd readers in their search after 
 truths higher than those which can be reached by the scalpel and 
 the microscope. But the question remains how far these infer- 
 ences from Hunter's philosophy are justified by what he himself 
 has written. 
 
 Now, it must be at once admitted that in Hunter's own hands 
 the investigation of nature was directed to natural phenomena 
 only. He speaks of " mind " and " will," but never speculates 
 on their origin, and what he has left as to their nature is not 
 very easy to understand. He teaches plainly enough that life is 
 a principle superadded to matter, of the exact nature of which 
 principle we know nothing, but which gives to matter its power 
 of organisation, of resistance to disintegration, of motion, and of 
 self-reproduction,* and the degree in which this vital principle 
 is contained in any part, or in other woi'ds, the force which the 
 part exercises to resist disintegration, is called by him the 
 
 * See vol. iii, pp. 115 — 117 ; also footnote, pp. 120 et seq. Chap, iv 
 of the ' Surgical Lectures,' vol. i, pp. 241 — 246, may be referred to 
 as a vei'y plain exposition of Hunter's teaching as to the diflFerence 
 between organisation and life, and the independence of the former 
 and its priority in time, though life is prior in causation. Life is 
 compounded with every part of the animal machine, and gives to 
 every part its inherent power of preserving itself and performing 
 its own actions. These actions when not regarding the separate 
 parts merely " are of whole parts, as the stomach, heart, organs of 
 respiration, organs of sensation, mind, and will."
 
 76 APPENDIX. 
 
 " power " of that part.* All this is plain enough ; but it is not 
 so easy to make out what is meant by the "materia vitse diffusa,"t 
 since at one part he seems to believe that this is the same matter 
 diffused through the body which is accumulated and rendepred 
 visible in the brain and nervous system. And yet this cannot 
 be his real meaning, for he goes on to show that the principle 
 of life is independent of the nervous tissue, since there are 
 living creatures which have no nerves, and the experiments on 
 eggs prove that life acts in the absence of all organisation. 
 In other passages he speaks of " the inflamed materia vitse" and 
 again of the " different systems of materia vitse "J in different 
 parts. Not less difficult is it to fix the exact sense in which he 
 uses the terms " mind " and " will." " The brain," he says, " is 
 a mass of this matter (so. materia vitae) not diffused through 
 anything for the purpose of that thing, but constituting an 
 organ in itself, the actions of which are for other purposes, viz. 
 receiving by means of the nerves the vast variety of actions in 
 the diffused materia vitse which arise from impression and 
 habit, combining these, and distinguishing from what part they 
 come. The whole of these actions form the mind, and, 
 according to the result, react so as to impress more or less of 
 the materia vitse of the body in return, producing in such parts 
 consequent actions. The brain then dejiends upon the body for its 
 impression, which is sensation, and the consequent action is that 
 of the mind ; and the body depends uj^on the consequence of 
 this intelligence, or effect of this mind, called the will, to impress 
 it to action ; but such § are not spent upon itself, but are for 
 other purposes, and are called voluntary." 
 
 In another place || he treats the same question thus : " lieason, 
 
 * Vol. iii, p. 8. 
 
 t This was an expression " with which his friends furnished him," 
 says Abernethy. He would have done better had he used his own 
 language. 
 
 + Vol. iii, pp. 334, 335. 
 
 § The editor here supplies the words " sensation and action." 
 Something has evidently dropped out of the text ; but I think it 
 must have been the word " actions " only, for sensation could not 
 be called " voluntary." 
 
 II Vol. i, p. 259.
 
 APPENDIX. 77 
 
 by influencing the will, becomes the cause of the voluntary 
 actions ; and by this connection all these principles " (that is, 
 the passive impressions received by the brain from the body, the 
 passions of the mind excited by such sensations, and the bodily 
 actions originated by the brain) " can affect one another. Now 
 the brain appears to be capable of two modes of action, and out 
 of these arises every property of the brain. We may call the 
 actions of the brain, mind : objects shall affect our senses so as 
 form a peculiar state of mind ; this, I call mental impression. 
 Again, the mind can reason and exercise volition respecting 
 objects. The former is involuntary, and belongs to brutes, the 
 latter is voluntary. For instance, I am challenged to fight a duel, 
 volition and reason determine me to go to it ; but, when at the 
 place my joints tremble, my stomach turns sicts ; this is the 
 effect of mental impression, or feelings of the mind. The two 
 operations are very different ; and, in general, the feelings of 
 the mind, if strong, will prevent all reasoning." 
 
 In this passage we have a clear distinction between the 
 " mental impressions," which brutes also have, and the " reason 
 and volition " which are peculiar to man. Reason and volition, 
 then, cannot be functions of the body, since the body is nearly 
 or quite as perfect in the brute as in man. 
 
 In the section also of the ' Lectures on Surgery ' (p. 359 — 
 361) which treats of " the effects of mind on diseases," we have 
 the independence of the mind strongly asserted and illustrated by 
 striking examples. Yet, we cannot but admit that several of 
 the expressions quoted above would, if they stood alone, coun- 
 tenance the merely materialistic view that what we call mind and 
 will are only phenomena produced somehow or other by molecular 
 changes in the matter of the brain. This, however, seems tome 
 quite inconsistent with the result of Hunter's teaching, looked 
 at as a whole. That teaching dwells strongly on the intrinsic 
 difference between matter and life, and between the properties 
 of unorganised matter (dynamical, chemical, electrical, and other 
 forces) and the vital actions produced in such matter when life 
 has been added to it. And hardly less strongly does it bring 
 out the essential difference between the corporeal actions which 
 are produced by the various stimuli and sympathies, of which 
 Hunter is never tired of speaking, and those mental and voli-
 
 78 APPENDIX. 
 
 tional actions which, as he shows so clearly, can suspend or even 
 reverse the natural actions of the body. Though Hunter, there- 
 fore, never sj^eaks (in fact, I believe deliberately avoids speaking) 
 of any supernatural agency, his whole teaching appears utterly 
 inconsistent with materialism. That doctrine, as Dr. Lionel 
 Beale has recently remarked,* "may be traced to the primary 
 belief in the assumjjtion that the living and non-living are one, 
 backed by ingenious speculations, invented for the purpose of 
 convincing people that the facts of life, as well as those of 
 nature, living and non-living, have been explained by physics 
 and chemistry." No theory could be more formally in opposi- 
 tion than this to the teaching of the man who wrote : " No 
 chemist on earth can make out of the earth a jiiece of sugar, 
 but a vegetable can do it." So far, then, it seems to me that 
 Grreen and Coleridge are right in claiming John Hunter's 
 teaching as supporting their view that life is a supernatural 
 endowment. 
 
 Another point in which the}^ seem to me correct is in the 
 praise which they bestow on Hunter's philosojDhy as one of ideas 
 and not merely of forces, that is to say, as teaching that behind 
 the forces by which the visible actions are produced is a purpose 
 directing those forces to a foreseen end.f We have got lately to 
 
 * ' Lancet,' Oct. 7th, 1893, p. 865. 
 
 t The whole of Green's Oration, 1840, entitled ' Vital Dynamics,' 
 is occupied with this contention. The following passage may be 
 quoted : " In the world do we not see everywhere evidences of a 
 unity, which the component parts are so far from explaining that 
 they necessarily presuppose the unity as the cause and condition of 
 their existing at all ? Every whole of parts, be it the minutest 
 crystal, a plant, an animal, the globe which sustains us, the solar 
 system of which it is a part, or the universe itself, in the infinitude 
 of which that system is less than a mote, every whole of parts 
 demands for its intelligibility a cause or principle of each union, a 
 power and unity antecedent in the order of efficiency, and remaining 
 present as the sustaining and conservative energy ; it implies a 
 legislative act, predetermining the result, compelling implicit obedi- 
 ence, and excluding all contingency. . . . Reflect on the exqui- 
 site harmony of all surrounding things and the coherence of all 
 to the Koafioe, to the order and beauty of the world ! How else could 
 a whole, a system of manifold agencies, result in sequence invari-
 
 APPENDIX. 79 
 
 tolerate at any rate, if not to embrace, a theory wliich, starting 
 from the general acceptance of the doctrines of evolution, wishes 
 to persuade us that everything has come to be as it is by a sort 
 of blind necessity. The hypothesis is a very old one. It excited 
 theridiculeof Aristophanes,* and inspired the beautiful poem of 
 Lucretius. But it has received new life from the ultra-Dar- 
 winians who do not seem to see that if evolution has really pro- 
 duced such brilliant results from such obscure beginnings, it 
 furnishes still stronger evidence of a purpose lying behind a 
 process which involves such continuous and wonderful progress 
 from the imperfect towards perfection. If Paley was right in 
 saying that the traces of design which were revealed to the dis- 
 coverer of the watch would be much strengthened if the watch 
 contained mechanism which enabled it to produce another watch 
 like itself, sxu'ely be would be entitled to argue that the presump- 
 tion would be raised near to certainty if the original machine 
 contained the germ and potency of machines rising in endless 
 complexity and constantly adapting themselves to ever new uses. 
 Now Hunter's works are full of the strongest possible state- 
 ments of teleological views, so full as to dispense entirely with 
 any necessity for quotation. He goes even so far as to speak of 
 the body as "conscious of the use" of various processes, and 
 defends his language, "because I have not a word for expressing 
 the cause of those actions which take place in the bodv as if it 
 was conscious that such and such things were going to take place. 
 There are actions of the body which come the nearest to con- 
 sciousness of the mind of anything I can conceive, and, there- 
 fore, I make use of this word."t And as to evolution, I have 
 shown in the text (p. 54) how near he came to the conception 
 at any rate of its leading idea, and how plainly he taught that 
 " we may suppose that nature is improving her works, or at 
 least has established the princijjle of improvement in the body 
 
 able, in connection necessary, in order permanent, in co-operation 
 harmonious, in government immutable, unless by a will manifested 
 in acts causative and intelligential, predetermining the final pur- 
 pose, and providing the means to the ultimate aim, already con- 
 templated in the antecedent unity of the legislative act ?" (p. 18.) 
 * ATvoc l3a(Ti\tvti tov Ai' l^iKi]\aKb)q, Nub., 1471, 
 
 t Vol. i, p. 236.
 
 80 APPENDIX. 
 
 as well as in the mind."* Does not this exactly correspond to 
 Green's language, quoted on p. 73, "Nature must not only feel 
 — she must know — her own being ; that is, mind must be super- 
 added to life " ? 
 
 I hold then that Green and Coleridge were perfectly justified 
 in their interpretation of Hunter's philosophy as abounding 
 everywhere in the assertion of a supernatural order and plan 
 (just as I hold that they were perfectly justified in their inter- 
 pretation of nature itself in the same sense) ; and as showing 
 that this plan culminates in the production of the only creature 
 known to us as possessing reason and voluntary control over 
 his own actions. Not that I would venture to assert, in opposi- 
 tion to so many eminent thinkers, that these doctrines can be 
 absolutely proved by the study of nature merely. But Hunter's 
 view of nature appears to me as strongly opposed to what is 
 called determinism as it is possible to conceive. 
 
 I do not wish to put this view of the matter in the least 
 degree more strongly than is warranted by a perusal of Hunter's 
 writings, and I have stated explicitly in the text (p. 47) that 
 there is nothing in Hunter's writings to show what views he 
 himself held on this world-old controversy, if any. It seems to 
 me that he either abstained altogether from thinking about such 
 things, or that he was too much wrapped up in his study of nature 
 to have time to put his views into definite shape, or possibly 
 that he was conscious that he did not shine in the treatment of 
 such subjects. This, however, does not in any way affect the 
 question what the logical inference is from the adoption of his 
 views about life. To that question I see only one answer. 
 Any student of nature is of course at liberty to uphold the 
 necessitarian doctrine, which indeed so many eminent students 
 do uphold ; and, of course, a student of Hunter may also 
 uphold it ; but he can only do s > logically by rei:)udiating 
 everything which his master has said on the subject. 
 
 * Vol. iv, footnote, p. 278. 
 
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