explains their presence by a reference to patholo- gical preparations.
But the loftiest efforts of John Hunter are to be found in his work on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-Shot Wounds. The mode of investigation in this masterpiece—the application of physiology to practice—suffices to distinguish him from all preceding writers, and may be consi- dered as the basis of modern pathology. Its in- fluence is felt not merely in surgery, but in medi- cine, for its principles are catholic. Up to the time of Hunter, surgeons were content to take their general view of the nature of disease from the phy- sicians. He emancipated them from their trammels, and established a body of doctrine so sound that it has wholly superseded the airy theories of medicine previously current. Nay, it seems to have stifled similar phantasmata in their birth, for since the days of Cullen and Brown no new “system” of physic has obtained the slightest vogue in England.
Hunter’s consummate skill in the experimental investigation of physiological questions has been often and most deservedly extolled. That famous experiment with the egg—the most brilliant thing done with an egg since the days of Columbus—has set the question of vital heat at rest for ever.
“JT put an egg,” he says, “into a freezing mixture about zero, and froze it, and then allowed it to thaw. ‘Through this process I conceived that the preserving power of the egg must be lost, which proved the case. I then put the egg into a freezing mixture at 15°, and with it a new-laid one, to make the com- parison on that which I should call alive, and the
