auditory is stated to have been embarrassed and awkward, or, as
Adams puts it (Obs. on Morbid Pois., p. 272), “frequently
ungraceful,” and his language always unadorned; but that his
“expressions for the explaining of his new theories rendered his
lectures often unintelligible” is scarcely evident in his pupils’
notes still extant. His own and others’ errors and fallacies were
exposed with equal freedom in his teaching. Occasionally he
would tell his pupils, “You had better not write down that
observation, for very likely I shall think differently next year”;
and once in answer to a question he replied, “Never ask me
what I have said or what I have written; but, if you will ask
me what my present opinions are, I will tell you.”
In January 1776 Hunter was appointed surgeon-extraordinary to the king. He began in the same year his Croonian lectures on muscular motion, continued annually, except in 1777, till 1782: they were never published by him, being in his opinion too incomplete. In 1778 appeared the second part of his Treatise on the Natural History of the Human Teeth, the first part of which was published in 1771. It was in the waste of the dental alveoli and of the fangs of shedding teeth that in 1754–1755, as he tells us, he received his first hint of the use of the absorbents. Abernethy (Physiological Lectures, p. 196) relates that Hunter, being once asked how he could suppose it possible for absorbents to do such things as he attributed to them, replied, “Nay, I know not, unless they possess powers similar to those which a caterpillar exerts when feeding on a leaf.” Hunter in 1780 read before the Royal Society a paper in which he laid claim to have been the first to make out the nature of the utero-placental circulation. His brother William, who had five years previously described the same in his Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus, thereupon wrote to the Society attributing to himself this honour. John Hunter in a rejoinder to his brother’s letter, dated the 17th of February 1780, reiterated his former statement, viz. that his discovery, on the evening of the day in 1754 that he had made it in a specimen injected by a Dr Mackenzie, had been communicated by him to Dr Hunter. Thus arose an estrangement between the two Hunters, which continued until the time of William’s last illness, when his brother obtained permission to visit him.
In 1783 Hunter was elected a member of the Royal Society of Medicine and of the Royal Academy of Surgery at Paris, and took part in the formation of “A Society for the Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge.”[1] It appears from a letter by Hunter that in the latter part of 1783, he, with Jenner, had the subject of colour-blindness under consideration. As in that year the lease of his premises in Jermyn Street was to expire, he purchased the twenty-four years’ leasehold of two houses, the one on the east side of Leicester Square, the other in Castle Street with intervening ground. Between the houses he built in 1783–1785, at an expense of above £3000, a museum for his anatomical and other collections which by 1782 had cost him £10,000. The new edifice consisted of a hall 52 ft. long by 28 ft. wide, and lighted from the top, with a gallery all round, and having beneath it a lecture theatre. In April 1785 Hunter’s collections were removed into it under the superintendence of Home and William Bell,[2] and another assistant, André. Among the foreigners of distinction who inspected the museum, which was now shown by Hunter twice a year—in October to medical men, and in May to other visitors—were J. F. Blumenbach, P. Camper and A. Scarpa. In the acquisition of subjects for his varied biological investigations and of specimens for his museum, expense was a matter of small moment with Hunter. Thus he endeavoured, at his own cost, to obtain information respecting the Cetacea by sending out a surgeon to the North in a Greenland whaler. He is said, moreover, to have given, in June 1783, £500 for the body of O’Brien, or Byrne, the Irish giant, whose skeleton, 7 ft. 7 in. high, is so conspicuous an object in the museum of the College of Surgeons of London.[3]
Hunter, who in the spring of 1769–1772 had suffered from gout, in spring 1773 from spasm apparently in the pyloric region, accompanied by failure of the heart’s action (Ottley, Life, p. 44), and in 1777 from vertigo with symptoms of angina pectoris, had in 1783 another attack of the last mentioned complaint, to which he was henceforward subject when under anxiety or excitement of mind.
In May 1785,[4] chiefly to oblige William Sharp the engraver, Hunter consented to have his portrait taken by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He proved a bad sitter, and Reynolds made little satisfactory progress, till one day Hunter, while resting his somewhat upraised head on his left hand, fell into a profound reverie—one of those waking dreams, seemingly, which in his lectures he has so well described, when “the body loses the consciousness of its own existence.”[5] The painter had now before him the man he would fain depict, and, turning his canvas upside down, he sketched out the admirable portrait which, afterwards skilfully restored by H. Farrar, is in the possession of the Royal College of Surgeons. A copy by Jackson, acquired from Lady Bell, is to be seen at the National Portrait Gallery, and St Mary’s Hall, Oxford, also possesses a copy. Sharp’s engraving of the original, published in 1788, is one of the finest of his productions. The volumes seen in Reynolds’ picture are a portion of the unpublished records of anatomical researches left by Hunter at his death, which, with other manuscripts, Sir Everard Home in 1812 removed from his museum, and eventually, in order, it has been supposed, to keep secret the source of many of his papers in the Philosophical Transactions, and of facts mentioned in his lectures, committed to the flames.[6]
Among the subjects of Hunter’s physiological investigation in 1785 was the mode of growth of deer’s antlers. As he possessed the privilege of making experiments on the deer in Richmond Park, he in July of that year had a buck there caught and thrown, and tied one of its external carotid arteries. He observed that the antler which obtained its blood supply therefrom, then half-grown, became in consequence cold to the touch. Hunter debated with himself whether it would be shed in due time, or be longer retained than ordinarily. To his surprise he found, on re-examining the antler a week or two later, when the wound around the ligatured artery was healed, that it had regained its warmth, and was still increasing in size. Had, then, his operation been in some way defective? To determine this question, the buck was killed and sent to Leicester Fields. On examination Hunter ascertained that the external carotid had been duly tied, but that certain small branches of the artery above and below the ligature had enlarged, and by their anastomoses had restored the blood supply of the growing part. Thus it was evident that under “the stimulus of necessity,” to use a phrase of the experimenter, the smaller arterial channels are
- ↑ The Transactions of the Society contain papers by Hunter on inflammation of veins (1784), intussusception (1789), a case of paralysis of the muscles of deglutition (1790), and a case of poisoning during pregnancy (1794), with others written by Home, from materials supplied by him, on Hunter’s operation for the cure of popliteal aneurism, on loose cartilages in joints, on certain horny excrescences of the human body, and on the growth of bones.
- ↑ Bell lived with Hunter fourteen years, i.e. from 1775 to 1789, and was employed by him chiefly in making and drawing anatomical preparations for the museum. He died in 1792 at Sumatra, where he was assistant-surgeon to the East India Company.
- ↑ O’Brien, dreading dissection by Hunter, had shortly before his death arranged with several of his countrymen that his corpse should be conveyed by them to the sea, and sunk in deep water; but his undertaker, who had entered into a pecuniary compact with the great anatomist, managed that while the escort was drinking at a certain stage on the march seawards, the coffin should be locked up in a barn. There some men he had concealed speedily substituted an equivalent weight of paving-stones for the body, which was at night forwarded to Hunter, and by him taken in his carriage to Earl’s Court, and, to avoid risk of a discovery, immediately after suitable division boiled to obtain the bones. See Tom Taylor, Leicester Square, ch. xiv. (1874); cf. Annual Register, xxvi. 209 (1783).
- ↑ See C. R. Leslie and Tom Taylor, Life and Times of Sir J. Reynolds, ii. 474 (1865).
- ↑ Works, i. 265–266.
- ↑ A transcript of a portion of Hunter’s MSS., made by Clift in 1793 and 1800, was edited by Sir Richard Owen, in two volumes with notes, in 1861, under the title of Essays and Observations in Natural History, Anatomy, Physiology, Psychology and Geology. On the destruction of Hunter’s papers see Clift’s “Appendix” in vol. ii. p. 497, also W. H. Flower, Introd. Lect., pp. 7-9 (1870).
