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advice of the surgeon William Cullen he turned his attention to
the study of medicine. His first attempt at teaching was in 1746,
when he delivered a series of lectures on surgery for the Society
of Naval Practitioners. These lectures proved so interesting and
instructive that he was at once invited to give others, and his
reputation as a lecturer was soon established. He was a natural
orator and story-teller, and he combined with these attractive
qualities that of thoroughness and clearness in demonstrations,
and although his lectures were two hours long he made them so
full of interest that his pupils seldom tired of listening. He
believed that he could do greater good to the world by “publicly
teaching his art than by practising it,” and even during the last
few days of his life, when he was so weak that his friends
remonstrated against it, he continued his teaching, fainting from
exhaustion at the end of his last lecture, which preceded his
death by only a few days.
For many years it was Hunter’s ambition to establish a museum
where the study of anatomy, surgery, and medicine might be
advanced, and in 1765 he asked for a grant of a plot of ground
for this purpose, offering to spend seven thousand pounds on its,
erection besides endowing it with a professorship of anatomy. Not
being able to obtain this grant, however, he built a house, in
which were lecture and dissecting rooms, and his museum. In this
museum were anatomical preparations, coins, minerals, and
natural-history specimens.
Hunter’s weakness was his love of controversy and his resentment
of contradiction. This brought him into strained relations with
many of the leading physicians of his time, notably his own
brother John, who himself was probably not entirely free from
blame in the matter. Hunter is said to have excused his own
irritability on the grounds that being an anatomist, and
accustomed to “the passive submission of dead bodies,”
contradictions became the more unbearable. Many of the
physiological researches begun by him were carried on and
perfected by his more famous brother, particularly his
investigations of the capillaries, but he added much to the
anatomical knowledge of several structures of the body, notably
as to the structure of cartilages and joints.
JOHN HUNTERIn Abbot Islip’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, close to the
resting-place of Ben Jonson, rest the remains of John Hunter
(1728-1793), famous in the annals of medicine as among the
greatest physiologists and surgeons that the world has ever
produced: a man whose discoveries and inventions are counted by
scores, and whose field of research was only limited by the
outermost boundaries of eighteenth-century science, although his
efforts were directed chiefly along the lines of his profession.
Until about twenty years of age young Hunter had shown little
aptitude for study, being unusually fond of out-door sports and
amusements; but about that time, realizing that some occupation
must be selected, he asked permission of his brother William to
attempt some dissections in his anatomical school in London. To
the surprise of his brother he made this dissection unusually
well; and being given a second, he acquitted himself with such
skill that his brother at once predicted that he would become a
great anatomist. Up to this time he had had no training of any
kind to prepare him for his professional career, and knew little
of Greek or Latin—languages entirely unnecessary for him, as he
proved in all of his life work. Ottley tells the story that,
when twitted with this lack of knowledge of the “dead languages”
in after life, he said of his opponent, “I could teach him that
on the dead body which he never knew in any language, dead or
living.”
By his second year in dissection he had become so skilful that he
was given charge of some of the classes in his brother’s school;
in 1754 he became a surgeon’s pupil in St. George’s Hospital, and
two years later house-surgeon. Having by overwork brought on
symptoms that seemed to threaten consumption, he accepted the
position of staff-surgeon to an expedition to Belleisle in 1760,
and two years later was serving with the English army at
Portugal. During all this time he was constantly engaged in
scientific researches, many of which, such as his observations of
gun-shot wounds, he put to excellent use in later life. On
returning to England much improved in health in 1763, he entered
at once upon his career as a London surgeon, and from that time
forward his progress was a practically uninterrupted series of
successes in his profession.
Hunter’s work on the study of the lymphatics was of great service
to the medical profession. This important net-work of minute
vessels distributed throughout the body had recently been made
the object of much study, and various students, including Haller,
had made extensive investigations since their discovery by
Asellius. But Hunter, in 1758, was the first to discover the
lymphatics in the neck of birds, although it was his brother
William who advanced the theory that the function of these
vessels was that of absorbents. One of John Hunter’s pupils,
William Hewson (1739-1774), first gave an account, in 1768, of
the lymphatics in reptiles and fishes, and added to his teacher’s
investigations of the lymphatics in birds. These studies of the
lymphatics have been regarded, perhaps with justice, as Hunter’s
most valuable contributions to practical medicine.
In 1767 he met with an accident by which he suffered a rupture of
the tendo Achillis—the large tendon that forms the attachment of
the muscles of the calf to the heel. From observations of this
accident, and subsequent experiments upon dogs, he laid the
foundation for the now simple and effective operation for the
cure of club feet and other deformities involving the tendons.
In 1772 he moved into his residence at Earlscourt, Brompton,
where he gathered about him a great menagerie of animals, birds,
reptiles, insects, and fishes, which he used in his physiological
and surgical experiments. Here he performed a countless number of
experiments—more, probably, than “any man engaged in
professional practice has ever conducted.” These experiments
varied in nature from observations of the habits of bees and
wasps to major surgical operations performed upon hedgehogs,
dogs, leopards, etc. It is said that for fifteen years he kept a
flock of geese for the sole purpose of studying the process of
development in eggs.
Hunter began his first course of lectures in 1772, being forced
to do this because he had been so repeatedly misquoted, and
because he felt that he could better gauge his own knowledge in
this way. Lecturing was a sore trial to him, as he was extremely
diffident, and without writing out his lectures in advance he was
scarcely able to speak at all. In this he presented a marked
contrast to his brother William, who was a fluent and brilliant
speaker. Hunter’s lectures were at best simple readings of the
facts as he had written them, the diffident teacher seldom
raising his eyes from his manuscript and rarely stopping until
his complete lecture had been read through. His lectures were,
therefore, instructive rather than interesting, as he used
infinite care in preparing them; but appearing before his classes
was so dreaded by him that he is said to have been in the habit
of taking a half-drachm of laudanum before each lecture to nerve
him for the ordeal. One is led to wonder by what name he shall
designate that quality of mind that renders a bold and fearless
surgeon like Hunter, who is undaunted in the face of hazardous
and dangerous operations, a stumbling, halting, and “frightened”
speaker before a little band of, at most, thirty young medical
students. And yet this same thing is not unfrequently seen among
the boldest surgeons.
Hunter’s Operation for the Cure of Aneurisms
It should be an object-lesson to those who, ignorantly or
otherwise, preach against the painless vivisection as practised
to-day, that by the sacrifice of a single deer in the cause of
science Hunter discovered a fact in physiology that has been the
means of saving thousands of human lives and thousands of human
bodies from needless mutilation. We refer to the discovery of the
“collateral circulation” of the blood, which led, among other
things, to Hunter’s successful operation upon aneurisms.
Simply stated, every organ or muscle of the body is supplied by
one large artery, whose main trunk distributes the blood into its
lesser branches, and thence through the capillaries. Cutting off
this main artery, it would seem, should cut off entirely the
blood-supply to the particular organ which is supplied by this
vessel; and until the time of Hunter’s demonstration this belief
was held by most physiologists. But nature has made a provision
for this possible stoppage of blood-supply from a single source,
and has so arranged that some of the small arterial branches
coming from the main supply-trunk are connected with other
arterial branches coming from some other supply-trunk. Under
normal conditions the main arterial trunks supply their
respective organs, the little connecting arterioles playing an
insignificant part. But let the main supply-trunk be cut off or
stopped for whatever reason, and a remarkable thing takes place.
The little connecting branches begin at once to enlarge and draw
blood from the neighboring uninjured supply-trunk, This
enlargement continues until at last a new route for the
circulation has been established, the organ no longer depending
on the now defunct original arterial trunk, but getting on as
well as before by this “collateral” circulation that has been
established.
The thorough understanding of this collateral circulation is one
of the most important steps in surgery, for until it was
discovered amputations were thought necessary in such cases as
those involving the artery supplying a leg or arm, since it was
supposed that, the artery being stopped, death of the limb and
the subsequent necessity for amputation were sure to follow.
Hunter solved this problem by a single operation upon a deer, and
his practicality as a surgeon led him soon after to apply this
knowledge to a certain class of surgical cases in a most
revolutionary and satisfactory manner.
What led to Hunter’s far-reaching discovery was his investigation
as to the cause of the growth of the antlers of the deer. Wishing
to ascertain just what part the blood-supply on the opposite
sides of the neck played in the process of development, or,
perhaps more correctly, to see what effect cutting off the main
blood-supply would have, Hunter had one of the deer of Richmond
Park caught and tied, while he placed a ligature around one of
the carotid arteries—one of the two principal arteries that
supply the head with blood. He observed that shortly after this
the antler (which was only half grown and consequently very
vascular) on the side of the obliterated artery became cold to
the touch—from the lack of warmth-giving blood. There was
nothing unexpected in this, and Hunter thought nothing of it
until a few days later, when he found, to his surprise, that the
antler had become as warm as its fellow, and was apparently
increasing in size. Puzzled as to how this could be, and
suspecting that in some way his ligature around the artery had
not been effective, he ordered the deer killed, and on
examination was astonished to find that while his ligature had
completely shut off the blood-supply from the source of that
carotid artery, the smaller arteries had become enlarged so as to
supply the antler with blood as well as ever, only by a different
route.
Hunter soon had a chance to make a practical application of the
knowledge thus acquired. This was a case of popliteal aneurism,
operations for which had heretofore proved pretty uniformly
fatal. An aneurism, as
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