John Hunter (surgeon)
John Hunter | |
---|---|
Born | Long Calderwood near East Kilbride, Scotland | 13 February 1728
Died | 16 October 1793 London, England | (aged 65)
Education | St Bartholomew's Hospital |
Known for | Scientific method in medicine Many discoveries in surgery and medicine |
Spouse |
foetal development, lymphatic system |
Awards | Copley Medal (1787) |
John Hunter FRS (13 February 1728 – 16 October 1793) was a British surgeon, one of the most distinguished scientists and surgeons of his day. He was an early advocate of careful observation and scientific methods in medicine. He was a teacher of, and collaborator with, Edward Jenner, pioneer of the smallpox vaccine. He paid for the stolen body of Charles Byrne, and proceeded to study and exhibit it against the deceased's explicit wishes. His wife, Anne Hunter (née Home), was a poet, some of whose poems were set to music by Joseph Haydn.
He learned anatomy by assisting his elder brother
Hunter became a Fellow of the
Early life
Hunter was born at
Education and training
When nearly 21 years old, he visited William in London, where his brother had become an admired teacher of anatomy. Hunter started as his assistant in dissections (1748), and was soon running the practical classes on his own.[4] It has recently been alleged that Hunter's brother William, and his brother's former tutor William Smellie, were responsible for the deaths of many women whose corpses were used for their studies on pregnancy.[5][6] Hunter is alleged to have been connected to these deaths since at the time he was acting as his brother's assistant.[7]
However, persons who have studied life in
Hunter heavily researched blood while bloodletting patients with various diseases. This helped him develop his theory that inflammation was a bodily response to disease, and was not itself pathological.[10]
Hunter studied under
Hunter was commissioned as an Army surgeon in 1760 and was a staff surgeon on an expedition to the French island of Belle Île in 1761, then served in 1762 with the British Army.[12]
Post-Army career
Hunter left the Army in 1763, and spent at least five years working in partnership with James Spence, a well-known London dentist.[13]
Hunter set up his own anatomy school in London in 1764 and started in private surgical practice.[14][15][16]
Self-experimentation
Hunter was elected as a Fellow of the
The experiment, reported in Hunter's A Treatise on the Venereal Diseases (part 6 section 2, 1786), does not indicate self-experimentation; this experiment was most likely performed on a third party. Hunter championed the treatment of gonorrhoea and syphilis with mercury and cauterization. Because of Hunter's reputation, knowledge concerning the true nature of gonorrhoea and syphilis was set back, and his theory was not proved to be wrong until 51 years later through research by French physician Philippe Ricord.[18][19]
Late career
In 1768, Hunter was appointed as surgeon to
In 1783, Hunter moved to a large house in Leicester Square. The space allowed him to arrange his collection of nearly 14,000 preparations of over 500 species of plants and animals into a teaching museum. The same year, he acquired the skeleton of the 2.31 m (7' 7") Irish giant Charles Byrne against Byrne's clear deathbed wishes—he had asked to be buried at sea.[20]
Hunter bribed a member of the funeral party (possibly for £500) and filled the coffin with rocks at an overnight stop, then subsequently published a scientific description of the anatomy and skeleton. "He is now, after having being stolen on the way to his funeral," says legal scholar Thomas Muinzer of the University of Stirling, "on display permanently as a sort of freak exhibit in the memorial museum to the person who screwed him over, effectively."[21] The skeleton was, until 2020, displayed in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.[22]
In 1786, he was appointed deputy surgeon to the British Army and in March 1790, he was made surgeon general by the then Prime Minister, William Pitt.[23] While in this post, he instituted a reform of the system for appointment and promotion of army surgeons based on experience and merit, rather than the patronage-based system that had been in place.[24]
Hunter's death in 1793 was due to a heart attack brought on by an argument at St George's Hospital concerning the admission of students. He was originally buried at St Martin-in-the-Fields, but in 1859 was reburied in the north aisle of the nave in Westminster Abbey,[25] reflecting his importance to the country.[26]
Hunter's character has been discussed by biographers:
His nature was kindly and generous, though outwardly rude and repelling.... Later in life, for some private or personal reason, he picked a quarrel with the brother who had formed him and made a man of him, basing the dissension upon a quibble about priority unworthy of so great an investigator. Yet three years later, he lived to mourn this brother's death in tears.[27]
He was described by one of his assistants late in his life as a man 'warm and impatient, readily provoked, and when irritated, not easily soothed'.[28]
Family
In 1771, he married
Legacy
In 1799, the government purchased Hunter's collection of papers and specimens, which it presented to the Company of Surgeons.
Contributions to medicine
Hunter helped to improve understanding of human teeth, bone growth and remodelling,
Literary references
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a key figure in Romantic thought, science, and medicine, saw in Hunter's work the seeds of Romantic medicine, namely as regards his principle of life, which he felt had come from the mind of genius.
WHEN we stand before the bust of John Hunter, or as we enter the magnificent museum furnished by his labours, and pass slowly, with meditative observation through this august temple, which the genius of one great man has raised and dedicated to the wisdom and uniform working of the Creator, we perceive at every step the guidance, we had almost said, the inspiration, of those profound ideas concerning Life, which dawn upon us, indeed, through his written works, but which he has here presented to us in a more perfect language than that of words – the language of God himself, as uttered by Nature. That the true idea of Life existed in the mind of John Hunter I do not entertain the least doubt...
— Coleridge[32]
Hunter was the basis for the character Jack Tearguts in
In Imogen Robertson's 2009 novel, Instruments of Darkness, anatomist Gabriel Crowther advises an acquaintance to seek refuge at his friend Hunter's home for the young Earl of Sussex's party from deadly pursuers released during the Gordon Riots; leopards in Hunter's menagerie killed the would-be assassins, and he envisaged their bodies' dissection.[34] In Jessie Greengrass's novel, Sight, she intercuts her story with the biography of Hunter and other scientists who have dedicated their lives to analysing light and transparency.[35]
His Leicester Square house is said to have been the inspiration for the home of
Memorials
The John Hunter Clinic of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London is named after him,[37] as are the John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle, Australia and the Hunterian Neurosurgical Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins Hospital.[38]
His birthplace in Long Calderwood, Scotland, has been preserved as Hunter House Museum.[39]
There had been a bust of Hunter in Leicester Square until the 2010–12 redesign of the square.[40]
References
- ^ "John Hunter". American Philosophical Society Member History. American Philosophical Society. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
- ^ required.)
- ^ Moore, p. 43
- ^ Brook C. 1945. Battling surgeon. Strickland, Glasgow. pp. 15–17
- ^ Shelton, Don 2010. The Emperor's new clothes. J. Royal Society of Medicine, February.
- ^ Shelton, Don. The real Mr Frankenstein: Sir Anthony Carlisle, medical murders, and the social genesis of Frankenstein. [1]
- ^ Founders of British obstetrics 'were callous murderers', Denis Campbell, 7 February 2010, The Observer, accessed May 2010
- ^ Inglis, Lucy. "Burking and Body-Snatching: The Deadly Side of Medicine in Georgian London". Archived 9 October 2011 at the Wayback Machine
- PMID 3511335.
- ISBN 978-0-521-27205-6.
- ^ June K. Burton (2007), Napoleon and the Woman Question: Discourses of the Other Sex in French Education, Medicine, and Medical Law, 1799–1815, Texas Tech University Press (2007), pp.81–82.
- ^ Moore, p. 188, quoting Hunter's The Works, vol 3 p. 549
- ^ Moore, pp. 223–224.
- ^ Moore, pp. 291–292, citing Laszlo Magyar's John Hunter and John Dolittle
- PMC 1168927.
- ^ Conniff, Richard (2012). "How Species Save Our Lives". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 March 2012.
- PMID 15937780.
- ^ Dr. Charles "Carl" Hoffman Archived 8 June 2010 at the Wayback Machine, Library of the History of Medical Sciences, Marshall University
- ^ Moore, p. 268, citing Deborah Hayden's Pox: Genius, Madness and the Mysteries of Syphilis (2003) and Diane Beyer Perett's Ethics and Error: the dispute between Ricord and Auzias-Turenne over syphilization 1845–70 (1977)
- ^ "The Saga of the Irish Giant's Bones Dismays Medical Ethicists". NPR.
- ^ "The Saga of the Irish Giant's Bones Dismays Medical Ethicists". NPR.
- ^ Doctors: the biography of medicine by Sherwin B. Nuland.
- ^ Moore, p477, citing Peterkin, Johnston & Drew, Commissioned Officers in the Medical Services of the British Army 1660–1960 (1968) vol 1, p. 33
- ^ Moore, p478
- ^ 'The Abbey Scientists' Hall, A.R. p21: London; Roger & Robert Nicholson; 1966
- ^ "John Hunter".
- ^ Garrison, Fielding H. 1913. An introduction to the history of medicine. Saunders, Philadelphia PA. p. 274
- ^ Home, p. lxv cited in Moore, p. 346.
- ^ a b Bettany, George Thomas (1891). Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 28. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 284–285. . In
- ^ "Hunter Gravestone Approx 15 Yards South of Church of St Bartholomew". British Listed Buildings. Retrieved 14 October 2021.
- ^ "ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION OF MARRIED WOMEN (Hansard, 26 February 1958)". api.parliament.uk. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
- ^ s:Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life[page needed]
- ^ Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (Hanover: Brown University Press 1988; revised ed. 1988)[page needed]
- ^ Robertson, Imogen (2009). Instruments of Darkness. Headline Publishing Group.
- ^ Hulbert, Ann (3 August 2018). "'Sight' Is an Unusual Novel About Motherhood That's Hard to Put Down". The Atlantic. Retrieved 9 March 2021.
- ^ Moore, p. 430, citing The Sketch of 24 February 1897, which related that Stevenson 'is said to have chosen' Hunter's house as his inspiration.
- ^ "John Hunter Clinic". Retrieved 19 January 2014.
- PMID 10626949.
- ^ Moore, pp. 546–7.
- ^ "John Hunter, Leicester Square". London Remembers. Retrieved 16 November 2020.
Further reading
- Adams, Joseph, (1817) Memoirs of the Life and Doctrines of the Late John Hunter, Esq., London.
- PMID 7734328.
- Dobson, Jessie, (1969) John Hunter, E&S Livingstone, Edinburgh and London.
- Kobler, John, (1960) The Reluctant Surgeon. A Biography of John Hunter, New York, Doubleday.
- ISBN 978-1-4090-4462-8.
- Ottley, Drewry, (1839) The Life of John Hunter, F.R.S., Philadelphia, Haswell.
- Paget, Stephen (1897). John Hunter, Man of Science and Surgeon. Masters of medicine. London: T. Fischer Unwin.
- "Review of John Hunter, Man of Science and Surgeon by Stephen Paget". The Athenæum (3657): 752–753. 27 November 1897.
- Peachey, George C. (1924) A Memoir of William & John Hunter, Plymouth: William Brendon & Son.
- Rogers, Garet (1958) Lancet, Bantam. Reissued as Brother Surgeons, Corgi, 1962; reprinted 1968.
- Mays, Eva (2020). The Gravid Cadaver. ISBN 979-8678808936
External links
- Works of John Hunter at the Internet Archive
- Medical biography at whonamedit.com
- John Hunter's Treatise on Venereal Disease Archived 8 June 2010 at the Wayback Machine
- The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons