Physiologist and surgeon; born at Long Calderwood, Glasgow, Scotland, July 14, 1728; youngest of ten children of whom one was the afterward celebrated William Hunter. John received very imperfect instruction at school; was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker; went in 1748 to study anatomy with his brother; studied at Oxford 1753–54; became a surgical pupil at St. Bartholomew’s 1751, and St. George’s 1754; studied surgery under Cheselden and Pott; lectured upon anatomy 1754–59; attained great knowledge of human and comparative anatomy; served in France and Portugal as staff-surgeon 1761–63; began to practice surgery in London 1763; was made F.R.S. 1767, in consequence of the publication of important papers containing new discoveries in pathology and physiology; became surgeon to St. George’s Hospital 1768; surgeon extraordinary to the king 1776; surgeon-general of the forces and inspector-general of hospitals 1790…. He was an anatomist of marvelous knowledge, and one of the fathers of zoölogical science. He was author of “Natural History of the Human Teeth” (1771–78); On “Venereal Disease” (1786); “Observations on Certain Parts of the Animal Economy” (1786); “On the Blood, Inflammation, and Gunshot Wounds” (1794). He was the collector of the great Hunterian Museum, chiefly of pathological and anatomical specimens, purchased by the British Government and presented to the Royal College of Surgeons. Died in London, Oct. 16, 1793.

Personal

	JOHN HUNTER, ESQ., F.R.S.,
	Surgeon-General to the Army, and
	Inspector-General of Hospitals;
	Surgeon to St. George’s Hospital;
	Surgeon-Extraordinary to the King;
	&c.,        &c.,        &c.,
	DIED OCTOBER 16th, 1793,
	On the same day, and perhaps hour,
	that the unfortunate Marie Antoinette
	Queen of France was beheaded in
	Paris.

  It was a truly interesting thing to hear Dr. Jenner, in the evening of his days, descanting from all the fervour of youthful friendship and attachment, on the commanding and engaging peculiarities of Mr. Hunter’s mind. He generally called him the “dear man,” and when he described the honesty and warmth of his heart, and his never-ceasing energy in the pursuit of knowledge, it was impossible not to be animated by the recital.

  He was fond of company and mixed much in the society of young men of his own standing, and joined in that sort of dissipation which men at his age, and freed from restraint, are but too apt to indulge in. Nor was he always very nice in the choice of his associates, but sometimes sought entertainment in the coarse, broad humour to be found amid the lower ranks of society. He was employed by his brother to cater for the dissecting-room, in the course of which employment he became a great favorite with that certainly not too respectable class of persons the resurrection-men and one of the amusements in which he took special pleasure, was to mingle with the gods in the shilling gallery, for the purpose of assisting to damn the productions of unhappy authors, an office in which he is said to have displayed peculiar tact and vigour.

	“O Lord, how manifold are thy works.”
	Beneath
	are deposited the remains of
	JOHN HUNTER,
	Born at Long Calderwood, Lanarkshire. N.B.,
	on the 13th of February, 1728.
	Died in London on the 16th of October, 1793.
	His remains were removed from the Church
	of St. Martin-in-the-Fields to this Abbey
	on the 28th of March, 1859.

  John Hunter’s coffin was, I knew, among this mass of coffins in No. 3 vault somewhere. It was my self-imposed task to find it; and the only way to do this was to inspect each coffin as it was brought out on its way to the catacombs outside the church. I therefore stationed myself at the door of the vault, and examined by the light of the lamp hung on to the door-post, every coffin as it came sliding down the plank, occasionally climbing on to the top of them, and looking about among them with my policeman’s bull’s-eye lamp to see if I could find the much-wished-for name of John Hunter inscribed on any of the brass coffin-plates. We worked away at this vault No. 3 for eight days, when, the Hunterian oration being so near, Mr. Burstall decided to go on moving the coffins at another part of the vault…. We worked on in No. 3 vault for seven days more, and, as may be imagined, I got very nervous towards the last, especially as I found the engraved brass coffin-plates loosened from the tops of the older coffins, and was very fearful that John Hunter’s coffin-plate might also have got loose…. The total number of coffins in No. 3 vault was over two hundred. The total number of coffins removed was three thousand two hundred and sixty. This will give some idea of the task that had to be undertaken. If one of these coffins, therefore was not John Hunter’s, our labours would have been in vain. The workmen stood at the head and foot of the uppermost coffin of the three, and slowly moved it away that I might see the name upon that immediately below it. As it moved slowly off I discerned first the letter J and the O, and at last the whole word “John.” My anxiety was now at its height, and I quickly running to one end, Mr. Burstall at the other, moved the coffin away. At last I got it completely off, and to my intense delight read upon the brass-plate the following inscription:

	John Hunter
	Esq.,
	Died 16th Octr.,
	1793,
	Age 64 Years.
	*        *        *        *        *

Though I had worked hard to gain the object I desired, I was not sorry that I had taken the entire responsibility, as well as the carrying out of the task, upon myself; for from my discovery arose two important events, viz.:—1. The reinterment of John Hunter in Westminster Abbey. 2. And then out of this the erection of a marble statue to his memory in the Museum, at the College of Surgeons.

  He allowed himself four hours’ sleep by night, and a short nap after dinner. He rose early to his dissections, experiments, and preparation-making, and was so busied for a couple hours, or more, prior to commencing the routine work of the day by the reception of his patients at half-past eight. His evenings were devoted to recording the thoughts and expanding the brief notes of the day. The social obligations which Hunter’s high position involved were mainly fulfilled, and admirably by his accomplished wife, whose words are wedded to the music of the immortal canzonets of Haydn, the great composer of the period. The four-windowed drawing-room which still looks upon the renovated square was crowded weekly by the beauty, rank and fashion of the season. My father-in-law described to me the scene he often stayed to witness with sleep-laden eyes, when the master could no longer dictate, and issued from his study on the ground floor to seek his much-needed repose, on one of Mrs. Hunter’s reception nights. With difficulty stemming the social stream on the staircase he would stop to give a kindly greeting to the beauty of the year, had a smart reply to the passing joke of the man of fashion, or a more serious to the question of an administrator, all hurrying away to some later gathering westward, while the weary philosopher sought to lay his head upon the pillow.

  In person Hunter was of middle height, vigorous, and robust, with high shoulders and rather short neck. His features were strongly marked, with prominent eyebrows, pyramidal forehead, and eyes of light blue or gray. His hair in youth was a reddish yellow, and in later years white…. Hunter often rose at five or six to dissect, breakfasted at nine, saw patients till twelve, and visited his hospital and outdoor patients till four. He was most punctual and orderly in his visits, leaving a duplicate of his visiting-book at home, so that he could be found at any time. He dined at four. For many years he drank no wine, and sat but a short time at table, except when he had company. He slept for an hour after dinner, then read or prepared his lectures, made experiments, and dictated the results of his dissections. He was often left at midnight with his lamp freshly trimmed, still at work. He wrote his first thoughts and memorandums on odd scraps of paper. These were copied and arranged, and formed many folio volumes of manuscript. Hunter would often have his manuscripts rewritten many times, making during the process endless corrections and transpositions. In manners Hunter was impatient, blunt, and unceremonious, often rude and overbearing, but he was candid and unreserved to a fault. He read comparatively little, and could never adequately expound the information already accessible on any subject. Most of what he knew he had acquired himself, and he attached perhaps undue importance to personal investigation. Few men have ever done so much with so little book-learning. His detachment from books, combined with his patient search for facts, gave him a vital grip of subjects most needing to be studied in the concrete. His opinions were always in process of improvement, and he never clung to former opinions through conservatism.

General

  His experiments, if they be true, carry with them no manner of information:—if they be true, no effect for the benefit of man can possibly be derived from them.

  The moral sense has often been found too weak to temper the malignancy of literary jealousy, and has impelled some men of genius to an incredible excess. A memorable example offers in the history of the two brothers, Dr. William and John Hunter, both great characters fitted to be rivals; but Nature, it was imagined in the tenderness of blood, had placed a bar to rivalry. John, without any determined pursuit in his youth, was received by his brother at the height of his celebrity; the doctor initiated him into his school; they performed their experiments together; and William Hunter was the first to announce to the world the great genius of his brother. After this close connexion in all their studies and discoveries, Dr. William Hunter published his magnificent work—the proud favorite of his heart, the assertor of his fame. Was it credible that the genius of the celebrated anatomist, which had been nursed under the wing of his brother, should turn on that wing to clip it? John Hunter put in his claim to the chief discovery; it was answered by his brother. The Royal Society, to whom they appealed, concealed the documents of this unnatural feud. The blow was felt, and the jealousy of literary honour forever separated the brothers—the brothers of genius.

  He appears to me as a new character in our profession; and, briefly to express his peculiar merit, I may call him the first and great physionosologist, or expositor of the nature of disease.

  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 was tolerably well acquainted with the opinions held by the surgeons most distinguished for their talents, then residing in the metropolis; but having heard Mr. Hunter’s lectures on the subject of disease, I found them so far superior to everything I had conceived or heard before, that there 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.

  Those who have traced the progress of modern surgery to its true source, will not fail to have discerned, in the principles which Hunter established, the germs of almost all the improvements which have been since introduced.

  The majority of Hunter’s contemporaries considered his pursuits to have little connexion with practice, charged him with attending to physiology more than surgery, and looked on him as little better than an innovator and an enthusiast.

  With many ideas to tell, and most of them new, had a difficulty of expressing himself. With more need than any man before him for additional facilities in this way, he had a restricted vocabulary: again, in making use of it, his style was seldom easy, often obscure; so that things which, when thoroughly understood, had no feature more striking than their simplicity, were often made to appear difficult, and by many readers, no doubt, had often been left unexamined.

  I have now only one more name to add to this splendid catalogue of the great Scotchmen of the eighteenth century. But it is the name of a man, who, for comprehensive and original genius, comes immediately after Adam Smith, and must be placed far above any other philosopher whom Scotland has produced. I mean, of course, John Hunter, whose only fault was, an occasional obscurity, not merely of language, but also of thought. In this respect, and, perhaps, in this alone, Adam Smith had the advantage; for his mind was so flexible, and moved so freely, that even the vastest designs were unable to oppress it. With Hunter, on the contrary, it sometimes seemed as if the understanding was troubled by the grandeur of his own conceptions, and doubted what path it ought to take. He hesitated; the utterance of his intellect was indistinct. Still, his powers were so extraordinary, that, among the great masters of organic science, he belongs, I apprehend, to the same rank as Aristotle, Harvey, and Bichat, and is somewhat superior either to Haller or Cuvier. As to this classification, men will differ, according to their different ideas of the nature of science, and, above all, according to the extent to which they appreciate the importance of philosophic method. It is from this latter point of view that I have, at present, to consider the character of John Hunter; and, in tracing the movements of his most remarkable mind, we shall find, that, in it, deduction and induction were more intimately united than in any other Scotch intellect, either of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The causes of this unusual combination, I will now endeavour to ascertain.

  In 1776, Hunter delivered his first course of surgical lectures at St. George’s. The sense of his deficiencies as a speaker led him to read his lectures. He seldom looked up from his book; and his written style was not happy. His doctrines were new, and their obscurity and difficulty was little relieved by his exposition. He used to compare the preparation of a lecture to a tradesman’s taking stock. His sole object was truth. He was pitiless in demolishing fallacies or exposing errors, even his own.

  All intelligent readers of biography are more or less familiar with the labors and writings of John Hunter, his marvellous genius, and his vast contributions to science. In the medical profession his name is, and always will be, a household word throughout the civilized world; it is spoken with respect and reverence in every college amphitheatre, and is deeply ingraved on the mind of every student of surgery…. With the exceptions of Hippocrates, the father of medicine, John Hunter is the grandest figure in the history of our profession…. He was not only a great surgeon, a wise physician and a great anatomist and physiologist, human and comparative, but above all, he was a philosopher whose mental grasp embraced the whole range of nature’s works, from the most humble structure to the most complex and the most lofty. He was emphatically the Newton of the medical profession, and what Pope said of that great philosopher may, by paraphrase, be said with equal force and truth of Hunter:

	“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
	God said ‘Let Hunter be,’ and all was light.”

Hunter is peerless in the history of British surgery; and after the lapse of nearly a century the profession turns to his memory with increased reverence for his transcendent genius, his matchless ability, and his unequalled services. To say that he was simply the founder of scientific surgery would fall far short of his great deserts; to do him full justice we must add that he was the father also of scientific zoology and of comparative physiology.

  Medical science owes much to John Hunter, who by his researches in animal and vegetable Physiology, made a vast number of discoveries, which, considered singly, are curious, but which, collectively, constitute an invaluable body of new truths. His museum, at the time of his death, contained upwards of ten thousand preparations illustrative of the phenomena of nature. His great object was to show that nature is a vast and united whole, that nothing is irregular, that nothing is perturbed, that in every change there is order, that all things are done according to never-failing law.

  The genius of one man—John Hunter—created English pathology, and took it at once almost to the highest position, for he fortified it with clinical, anatomical, and experimental observations which are unassailable when they are combined. John Hunter was in some respects even more remarkable than William, his elder brother. He possessed greater singleness of purpose, and therefore greater concentration, greater depth of knowledge, greater determination, and that minute attention to detail associated with the power of generalisation which only coexist in the highest intellects.

  It is impossible to include in one view the multitudinous forms of Hunter’s work; you cannot see the wood for the trees. He was anatomist, biologist, naturalist, physician, surgeon, and pathologist, all at once, and all in the highest. Nor is it possible to reproduce the lights and shadows of that aspect of his life which was not turned toward science…. He is like Vesalius; he made his name immortal by the labour of his own hands outside the sphere of surgery. Apart from all his hospital and private practice, and all his writing and lecturing, the actual manual work that he accomplished in dissections and post-mortem examinations is past all telling. Twelve years before he died, at Captain Donellan’s trial, he was asked, “You have been long in the habit of dissecting human subjects; I presume you have dissected more than any man in Europe?” and he answered, “I have dissected some thousands during these thirty-three years.” His dissections of animals must also be reckoned in thousands. Literary work was uncongenial to him, and against the grain; he took no pleasure in style and no pains over spelling, submitted his writings to the corrections of his friends, adopted at their suggestion Greek words, and that most foolish phrase “materia vitæ diffusa.” But in anatomy and experiment he had the strength and patience of ten; and Clift often saw him, in his old age, standing like a statue for hours over some delicate bit of dissection. The whole output of his working life is fourfold—literary, surgical, anatomical, physiological and experimental; but the multiplication together of these factors does not give the whole result of his work. He brought surgery into closer touch with science. Contrast him with Ambroise Paré, a surgeon in some ways like him, shrewd, observant, ahead of his age; the achievements of Paré, side by side with those of Hunter, are like child’s play in comparison with the serious affairs of men; Paré advanced the art of surgery, but Hunter taught the science of it.