Chapter V (2)

About this time Mr. Hunter was allowed to nominate Home as his assistant at St. George’s, and in 1792 Home undertook a further portion of his work, by delivering the surgical lectures, for which purpose he was intrusted with Mr. Hunter’s manuscripts. This enabled Mr. Hunter to give more time to the preparation of his great treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gunshot Wounds, which, however, remained to be published by his executors in 1794. Death was about to claim him, and the immediate cause which led to his end was a dispute with his colleagues and the governors of St. George’s Hospital about pupils’ fees. In his treatment of pupils personally Hunter was always generous, especially when they showed ability and zeal. Thus he gave Carlisle a perpetual ticket to his lectures, having been much pleased with a preparation he brought for his acceptance, showing the internal ear very excellently. He would often also send valuable patients to young men starting in practice, and struggling with pecuniary difficulties. He never concealed from his pupils the hard work he had done to attain his position: “I’ve been here a great many years, and have worked hard too, and yet I don’t know the principles of the art,” he remarked to one. He did not, however, get on so well with his fellow-surgeons at the hospital. He so constantly insisted on the importance of studying physiology for the benefit of surgical practice, while they had been educated with little or no physiology, that his manner, as well as his pursuits, procured him the stigma of being an innovator and enthusiast. Early in 1792 one of his colleagues, Charles Hawkins, resigned the surgeoncy, and Keate, then assistant to Gunning, the senior surgeon, was elected his successor by a considerable majority, in opposition to Home, who was, of course, Hunter’s candidate. The acrimony of the contest appears to have led Hunter to announce his intention of no longer dividing with them the fees received for the surgeons’ pupils, owing, as he alleged, to his desire that the other surgeons should pay more attention to their pupils, instead of neglecting them, as he asserted they did. His right to do this was warmly contested, and the question was referred to the subscribers to the hospital. Hunter addressed them a long letter before the day of meeting, in March 1793, detailing the efforts he had made since his connection with the hospital to induce his colleagues to improve the system of instruction, which efforts had proved ineffectual: one man “did not choose to hazard his reputation by giving lectures;” another “did not see where the art could be improved.” Consequently Hunter had slackened his own efforts, causing a great falling off in the numbers of students. The other surgeons replied that they had continued the usual plan, and that if students had neglected their hospital duties to pursue physiological studies, it was not their fault. If they had given lectures, copies of them might have been taken by the pupils and might get abroad. Mr. Hunter’s connection with the Windmill Street Anatomical School, and his power of conferring posts in the army, not his superior attention to his pupils, were the cause of a larger number of pupils entering under him. They were able to show that it would be a manifest disadvantage that only one surgeon should instruct a pupil and not all four. The governors decided against Hunter, for his plan must have produced confusion and discord. A committee drew up rules for the admission and regulation of pupils, and these were adopted without any consultation with Mr. Hunter. One of them, which seemed specially directed against him, forbade the entry of any pupil who had not had previous medical instruction. Young men frequently came up to London from Scotland, recommended to Mr. Hunter, and were entered by him at the hospital without having had any previous medical instruction. A case in point arose in the succeeding autumn. Two young men came up in the usual way, and ignorant of the new rule, Hunter undertook to press for their admission at the next Board meeting, on the 16th October 1793. On the morning of the day he expressed his anxiety to a friend lest some dispute might occur, as he was convinced such an occurrence would be fatal to him. His life, he used to say, “was in the hands of any rascal who chose to annoy and tease him.” Leaving home at the usual hour, he forgot, strange to say, to take his list of appointments with him, and Mr. Clift hastened after him with it. Later, arriving at the hospital, he found the Board already assembled, and presented and supported his memorial. During his speech one of his colleagues flatly contradicted him, and Hunter immediately ceased speaking, retired from the table, and, struggling to suppress his passion, hurried into an adjoining room, which he had scarcely reached when, with a deep groan, he fell lifeless into the arms of Dr. Robertson, one of the hospital physicians. Dr. Baillie his nephew, and Home, who was present, made every effort to restore him, but in vain. Thus were cut short at once the meeting of the St. George’s Board, and the life of the greatest surgeon they had had. He was buried in a simple manner on October 22d, at St Martin’s in the Fields. A _post mortem_ examination had shown that his heart was wasted and diseased, and his coronary arteries, mitral valves, and aorta much ossified and diseased, thus justifying Dr. Jenner’s diagnosis.

In person Hunter was of about middle height, vigorous and robust, with high shoulders and short neck, strongly marked features, projecting eyebrows, light-coloured eyes, and high cheeks. He always dressed plainly, with his hair curled behind; this had been reddish-yellow in early life, but white latterly.

Mr. Hunter left little but his museum, which he wished the nation to purchase and provide for. After years of effort, in the course of which Mr. Pitt, on being appealed to, replied: “What! buy preparations! why, I have not money enough to purchase gunpowder,” Parliament in 1799 voted £15,000 for his museum (it had cost Hunter over £70,000), and its guardianship was offered to the College of Physicians, which declined it, and then to the College of Surgeons, which accepted it, gaining at the same time a new charter and the title of Royal. Hours during which the collection might be open for professional men and others to study, and a keeper to explain the collection, were stipulated for, and at least twenty-four lectures were to be given annually on comparative anatomy and other subjects by members of the college. These are the well-known Hunterian lectures made illustrious by Owen, Huxley, Parker, and Flower. The collection was placed in a temporary habitation in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1806, and Parliament has granted in all £42,500 at various dates for the building of a suitable museum. The present building, however, has cost very much more than the sum mentioned, the expense being defrayed out of the college revenues for diplomas.

During the weary years of waiting for the government consent to purchase the museum, Hunter’s family had to be maintained by the sale of his furniture and library, and his miscellaneous collection of objects of _virtu_, coats of mail, weapons, &c.; and the mere conservation of the museum was a matter of considerable expense. His papers fell into the hands of Mr., afterwards Sir Everard Home, who detained them without publishing them for many years, during which time he himself published a vast variety of papers under his own name in the Philosophical Transactions. It is generally believed that many of these were largely derived from Mr. Hunter’s manuscripts; and this the more, that, when at last, after many years of evasion, his co-trustees of the museum pressed him to deliver up the manuscripts as they were, he secretly burnt almost the whole of them. In fact, Mr. Clift, who became keeper of the museum, and had been long the assistant and friend of Sir Everard, when questioned by the Commission on Medical Education, replied that all his life he had been employed by Sir Everard in transcribing portions of Mr. Hunter’s manuscripts, and in copying drawings from his portfolios, which Sir Everard issued to the public as his own. It was in 1823, when Sir Everard had received from the printer the final proof of his last volume on Comparative Anatomy, that he disgraced his name for ever by this great and irreparable destruction. Mr. Clift’s list of what he remembers of the burnt papers fills more than a page of the memoir of John Hunter prefixed to vol. x. of Jardine’s Naturalists’ Library. And the bare enumeration and contents would give but little idea of the labour expended in its production. “I have many times,” says Mr. Clift, his assistant and amanuensis during the last twenty months of his life, “written the same page at least half a dozen times over, with corrections and transpositions almost without end,” so great was the difficulty Hunter felt in adequately expressing his ideas. But this only serves to increase our regret that these valuable originals should have been destroyed. He generally wrote his first thoughts or memoranda on all subjects on the slips torn off from the ends, and the blank pages and envelopes of letters. He appeared to have no desire of preserving his own hand-writing, but when they had been copied, usually folded them up, and put them on the chimney-piece to light the candle with; and the rough or waste copies on all subjects, when copied out fair, were taken into his private dissecting-room, as waste paper to dissect upon.

Sir Everard Home[14] describes his brother-in-law as “very warm and impatient, readily provoked, and when irritated, not easily soothed. His disposition was candid and free from reserve, even to a fault. He hated deceit, and was above every kind of artifice; he detested it in others, and too openly avowed his sentiments. In conversation he spoke too freely, and sometimes harshly of his contemporaries; but if he did not do justice to their undoubted merit, it arose not from envy, but from a thorough conviction that surgery was yet in its infancy, and he himself a novice in his own art; and his anxiety to have it carried to perfection made him think meanly and ill of every one whose exertions in this respect did not equal his own.” He was called the Cerberus of the Royal Society, and certainly it appears easier to admire and estimate him correctly now than it would have been to live in comfort with him. Yet, when advanced in practice and honours, he paid more instead of less attention to those whom he had known earlier. Mr. Gough, who had charge of a menagerie in Piccadilly, related that when he called on Mr. Hunter, if the house was full of patients, and carriages waiting at the door, he was always admitted. “You have no time to spare,” said he, “as you live by it. Most of these can wait, as they have little to do when they go home.” It is certain that Hunter only valued money as it enabled him to carry on his researches. He introduces a patient to his brother thus: “He has no money, and you have plenty, so you are well met;” and he would never take fees from curates, authors, and artists. With his lack of courtliness and evident zeal for dissection, it can be no wonder that his income never reached £1000 before 1774. Yet afterwards it increased to £5000 for some years, and had reached to £6000 when he died. But all he could spare, throughout, went to his museum.

Hunter’s sense of his own importance was evident, and often very ingenuously expressed. “Ah, John Hunter, what! still hard at work!” said Dr. Garthshore to him, finding him in the dissecting-room late in life. “Yes, doctor,” replied Hunter, “still hard at work; and you’ll find it difficult to meet with another John Hunter when I am gone.” To Abernethy he said, “I know I am but a pigmy in knowledge, yet I feel as a giant when compared with these men.” He could not be described as a good conversationalist, yet his remarks, slowly brought out, were often wonderfully pointed and forcible. In politics he was a strenuous Tory, and “wished all the rascals who were dissatisfied with their country would be good enough to leave it.” He hated all public ceremony or display, and when begged to go to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s funeral, fairly wished Sir Joshua and his friends at the d——l.

He was undeviatingly honest, eminently a lover of truth, humane and generous in disposition, warm and disinterested as a friend, a kind affectionate husband and father. Some have called him a materialist or even an atheist, but he appears to have had no doubt of the existence of a First Cause. His study of religion was no doubt limited by natural tendencies in his mind, and by his habitual concentration on his work, and the evidence of revelation did not make, so far as can be ascertained, a deep impression on his mind. As to death, his view was, “’tis poor work when it comes to that.”

Hunter’s remains lay undisturbed in St. Martin’s Church, till on March 28, 1859, they were removed, mainly through Mr. Frank Buckland’s intervention, to Abbot Islip’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey and deposited in the north aisle of the nave, close to Ben Jonson’s tomb. His name and achievements are annually commemorated by orations such as those from which the subsequent extracts are made, but most of all by the Hunterian Museum and the lectures delivered in connection therewith.

To expound Hunter’s views of life, and the results of his other philosophical and practical studies, would lead us far beyond our limits. Life he regarded as a principle independent of structure; as a great chemist; as a sort of animal fire. “Mere composition of matter,” he said, “does not give life; for the dead body has all the composition it ever had. Life is a property we do not understand; we can only see the necessary steps leading towards it.” He imagined that life might either be something superadded to matter, or consist in a peculiar arrangement of particles of matter, which being thus disposed acquired the properties of life. As to equivocal generation, he believed—and here he coincides with the best results of modern sciences—that all we could have was negative proofs of its not taking place. As to geological changes, he had strikingly original views, regarding water as the chief agent, and pointing out that the popular view by which the Deluge was supposed to account for finding marine organisms in rocks was untenable. He could discern that in the long past great oscillations of level and climatic variations had taken place. In regard to development and evolution, he had very luminous ideas pointing to modern discoveries. Thus he remarks “if we were to take a series of animals from the more imperfect to the perfect, we should probably find an imperfect animal corresponding with some stage of the most perfect.”

We cannot more clearly emphasise the character of Hunter’s intellect and work than in the words of two distinguished men of our own time, both eminent pathologists, and qualified as few can be for estimating such a man.

Dr. Moxon[15] says:—

“If we ask what gave him that most valuable power of estimating what was worth doing, and what could be done—the power which Bacon calls the ‘mathematics of the mind’—we find the reply, I believe, in these great facts of his history. Firstly, that he was a man who had a free youth, not over-taught, nor over-strained; and, secondly, that in his manhood he worked with an eye to usefulness and duty, and not only to notoriety, nor to the mere cry of ‘who will show us something new?’ Indeed, the main and distinctive feature of his noble life was his resolute pursuit of the practical aim of his profession, to establish sound laws for scientific surgery and medicine. I have said that the wonderful store of facts he collected constituted answers to questions: Hunter the physiologist answering the questions of Hunter the surgeon. He did not so follow physiology as to turn it away from usefulness. And the results of his work he puts up in his museum. And he will gladly have anything for his collection. But always putting things by in their physiological order, mark, so that in due time they shall answer to his further questions. He will lecture on surgical principles,—true ones they must be,—if he changes them yearly in accordance with his observations. But he will not, he cannot, lecture on comparative anatomy or zoology. Why not? It does not conform enough with his main bent to surgery, to practical aim, to a duty. He believes in a vital principle, therefore he must have an aim before him. He succeeds in his aim; and by the masterly introduction of the operation on aneurism which bears his name he saves thousands from a painful death. Led further by the same enthusiasm for the true purpose of his life as a surgeon, he inoculates his frame with a loathsome disease that he may have it always by him to study it, regardless of danger and of pain.”

Sir James Paget’s views[16] are thus expressed:—

“The range of Hunter’s work matched with the time devoted to it. Never before or since—I think I am safe in saying this—was any one a thorough investigator and student in so wide a range of science. He was an enthusiastic naturalist; as a comparative anatomist and physiologist he was unequalled in his time; among the few pathologists he was the best; among the still fewer geologists and students of vegetable physiology, he was one, if not the chief; and he was a great practical surgeon. He was surgeon to a large hospital in London, and for many years held the largest practice in the metropolis. In all these things at one time no one but Hunter ever was eminent and successful.... There is not one of them in which he did not make investigations wholly original—not one of them of which he did not enlarge the area very far beyond that which had been covered by his predecessors—not one of them in which he did not leave facts and principles on record which it is impossible to count and very hard to estimate.

“In all these characters of Hunter’s works we see that which was the dominant character of his mind—massiveness and grandeur of design were indicated in all to which he applied himself. And in perfect harmony with this was the simplicity of his ordinary method of work. It consisted mainly in the orderly accumulation of facts from every source, of every kind, and building them up in the simplest inductions. If he had been an architect, he would have built huge pyramids, and every stone would have borne its own inscription. He knew nothing of logic or the science of thought. He used his mental power as with a natural instinct. He worked with all his might, but without art. I know no instance so striking as in him of the living force which there is in facts when they are stored in a thoughtful mind.

“But Hunter was not only a great observer, he was a very acute one. I think it would be difficult to find in all the masses of facts which he has recorded any one which was either observed or recorded erroneously. If there are errors in his works, they are the errors of reasoning, not of observation. And it may be noted, as a singular example of his accuracy, that when he tells his inferences it is generally with expressions implying that he regarded them as only probable: a fact he tells without conditions; when he generalises, it is with ‘I suspect,’ ‘I believe,’ ‘I am disposed to think,’ or the like.... He seems to have thought he had never reached farther than the nearest approach to truth, which was at that time attainable, and that a year or more of investigation would bring him nearer to the truth, and then that which now seemed right would be surpassed or set aside. He used to say to his pupils in his lectures, ‘Do not take notes of this; I daresay I shall change it all next year.’”

Abernethy, who knew him well, says: “It is scarcely credible with what pains Mr. Hunter examined the lower kinds of animals,” and he quotes Mr. Clift as saying that “he would stand for hours motionless as a statue, except that with a pair of forceps in either hand he was picking asunder the connecting fibres of some structure” that he was examining: ... “patient and watchful as a prophet, sure that the truth would come: it might be in the unveiling of some new structure, or in the clearing up of some mental cloud; or it might be as in a flash, in which, as with inspiration, intellectual darkness becomes light.”

FOOTNOTES:

[12] Author of the defamatory so-called Life of John Hunter, 1794.

[13] “Life of John Hunter,” by Drewry Ottley, 1835.

[14] Life of John Hunter, prefixed to the treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, &c.

[15] _Medical Times and Gazette_, March 3, 1877.

[16] _Medical Times and Gazette_, Feb. 17, 1877.