John Hunter (surgeon)

John Hunter
Portrait after Sir Joshua Reynolds in the Royal College of Surgeons. The skeleton of the Irish giant Charles Byrne is in the background.
Born	13 February 1728(1728-02-13) Long Calderwood, East Kilbride, Scotland
Died	16 October 1793(1793-10-16) (aged 65)
Education	St. Bartholomew's Hospital
Known for	Scientific method in medicine Many discoveries in surgery & medicine
Profession	Surgeon
Institutions	St. George's Hospital
Research	Dentistry, gunshot wounds, venereal diseases, digestion, child development, foetal development, lymphatic system

John Hunter FRS (13 February 1728 – 16 October 1793) was a Scottish surgeon regarded as one of the most distinguished scientists and surgeons of his day. He was an early advocate of careful observation and scientific method in medicine. The Hunterian Society of London was named in his honour. He was the husband of Anne Hunter.

Life

Hunter was born at Long Calderwood, now part of East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, Scotland the youngest of ten children. The date of his birth is uncertain. Robert Chamber's "Book of Days" (1868) gives an alternate birth date of July 14, and Hunter is recored as always celebrating his birthday on the 14th rather than the 13th July shown in the parish register of the town of his birth. Family papers cite his birthday as being variously on the 7th and tyhe 9th of February. Three of Hunter's siblings, (one of which had also been named John) had died of illness before John Hunter was born. An elder brother was William Hunter, the anatomist. As a youth, John showed little talent, and helped his brother-in-law as a cabinet-maker.

In 1771 he married Anne Home, daughter of Robert Boyne Home and sister of Sir Everard Home. They had four children, two of whom died before the age of 5 and one of whom, Agnes (their fourth child), married General Sir James Campbell of Inverneill.

His death in 1793 followed a heart attack during an argument at St George's Hospital over the admission of students.

Career

Early Education and Training

When nearly 21 he visited William in London, where his brother had become an admired teacher of anatomy. John started as his assistant in dissections (1748), and was soon running the practical classes on his own. It has recently been alleged that Hunter's brother William, and his brother's former tutor William Smellie, were responsible for the deaths of many women whose corpses were used for their studies on pregnancy. John is alleged to have been connected to these murders, since at the time he was acting as William's assistant. However, persons who have studied life in 18th-century London agree that the number of gravid women who died in London during the years of Hunter's and Smellie's work was not particularly high for that locality and time; the prevalence of pre-eclampsia, a common condition affecting ten percent of all pregnancies and one easily treated today, but for which there was no treatment in Hunter's time, would more than suffice to explain a mortality rate that seems suspiciously high to 21st-century readers. In The Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures, published in 1774, Hunter provides case histories for at least four of the subjects illustrated.

Hunter studied under William Cheselden at Chelsea Hospital and Percival Pott at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. After qualifying he became Assistant Surgeon (house surgeon) at St George's Hospital (1756) and Surgeon (1768).

Time as an Army Surgeon

He was commissioned as an Army surgeon in 1760 and was staff surgeon on expedition to the French island of Belle Île in 1761, then served in 1762 with the British Army in the expedition to Portugal. Contrary to prevailing medical opinion at the time, Hunter was against the practice of 'dilation' of gunshot wounds. This practice, which involved the surgeon deliberately expanding a wound with the aim of making the gunpowder easier to remove. Although sound in theory, in the unsanitary conditions of the time it increased the chance of infection, and Hunter's practice was not to perform dilation 'except when preparatory to something else' such as the removal of bone fragments.

Post-Army Career

Hunter left the Army in 1763, and spent at least five years working in partnership with James Spence, a well-known London dentist. Although not the first person to conduct tooth transplants between living people, he did advance the state of knowledge in this area by realising that the chances of an (initially, at least) successful tooth transplant would be improved if the donor tooth was as fresh as possible and was matched for size with the recipient. These principles are still used in the transplanation of internal organs. Although donated teeth never properly bonded with the recipients' gums, one of Hunter's patients stated that he had three which lasted for six years, a remarkable period at the time.

Hunter set up his own anatomy school in London in 1764 and started in private surgical practice.

Earl's Court House

In 1765 he bought a house near the Earl's Court district in London. The house had large grounds which were used to house a collection of animals including 'zebra, Asiatic buffaloes and mounatin goats', as well as jackals. (In the house itself, Hunter boiled down the skeletons of some of these animals as part of research on animal anatomy.) A newspaper article reported that many animals that were 'supposed to be hostile to each other but among which, in this new paradise, the greatest friendship prevails', and this image may have been the inspiration for the Doctor Doolittle literary character.,

Self-experimentation

Hunter was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767. At this time he was considered the authority on venereal diseases. In May 1767, he believed that gonorrhea and syphilis were caused by a single pathogen. Living in an age when physicians frequently experimented on themselves, he inoculated himself with gonorrhea, using a needle that was unknowingly contaminated with syphilis. When he contracted both syphilis and gonorrhea, he claimed it proved his erroneous theory that they were the same underlying venereal disease. He championed its treatment with mercury and cauterization. He included his findings in his Treatise on the Venereal Disease, first issued in 1786. Because of Hunter’s reputation, knowledge concerning the true nature of gonorrhea and syphilis was retarded, and it was not until 51 years later that his theory was proved to be wrong.

Late Career

In 1768 Hunter was appointed as surgeon to St. George's Hospital. Later he became a member of the Company of Surgeons. In 1776 he was appointed surgeon to King George III.

In 1783 Hunter moved to a large house in Leicester Square, where today there stands a statue to him. The space allowed him to arrange his collection of nearly 14,000 preparations of over 500 species of plants and animals into a teaching museum.

Also in 1783 he acquired the skeleton of the 7' 7" Irish giant Charles Byrne against Byrne's clear deathbed wishes – he asked to be buried at sea. Hunter bribed a member of the funeral party (possibly for £500) and filled the coffin with rocks at an overnight stop, then subsequently published a scientific description of the anatomy and skeleton. The skeleton today is in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

In 1786 he was appointed deputy surgeon to the British Army and in 1790 he was made Surgeon General.

Legacy and contributions to medicine

In 1799 the government purchased Hunter's collection of papers and specimens, which it presented to the Company of Surgeons. He was an excellent anatomist; his knowledge and skill as a surgeon was based on sound anatomical background. Among his numerous contributions to medical science are:

• study of human teeth
• extensive study of inflammation
• fine work on gunshot wounds (see above)
• some work on venereal diseases, in addition to his work following his likely self-experimentation.
• an understanding of the nature of digestion, and verifying that fats are absorbed into the lacteals, a type of small intestine lymphatic capillary, and not into the intestinal blood capillaries as was generally accepted.
• the first complete study of the development of a child
• proof that the maternal and foetal blood supplies are separate
• unravelling of one of the major anatomical mysteries of the time – the role of the lymphatic system

Character

Bust of Hunter
Leicester Square, London.

Hunter's character has been discussed by biographers:

"To the kindness of his disposition, his fondness for animals, his aversion to operations, his thoughtful and self-sacrificing attention to his patients, and especially his zeal to help forward struggling practitioners and others in any want abundantly testify. Pecuniary means he valued no further than they enabled him to promote his researches; and to the poor, to non-beneficed clergymen, professional authors and artists his services were rendered without remuneration."

"His nature was kindly and generous, though outwardly rude and repelling... Later in life, for some private or personal reason, he picked a quarrel with the brother who had formed him and made a man of him, basing the dissension upon a quibble about priority unworthy of so great an investigator. Yet three years later, he lived to mourn this brother's death in tears."

He had a reputation as a man with a 'fiery temper and maverick views'.

Miscellany

Literary

Hunter was the basis for the character "Jack Tearguts" in William Blake's unfinished satirical novel, An Island in the Moon. He is a principal character in Hilary Mantel's 1998 novel, The Giant, O'Brien.

Memorials

A bust of John Hunter stands on a pedestal outside the main entrance to St George's Hospital in Tooting, South London, along with a lion and unicorn taken from the original Hyde Park Corner building. There is also a bust of him in Leicester Square in London's West End and in the South West corner of Lincoln's Inn Fields.

The John Hunter Hospital, the largest hospital in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, and principal teaching hospital of the University of Newcastle, is named after Hunter (as well as two other historically significant John Hunters).

His birthplace in Long Calderwood, Scotland, has been preserved as Hunter House Museum.

Musical

In 1791, when Joseph Haydn was visiting London for a series of concerts, Hunter offered to perform an operation for the removal of a large nasal polyp which was troubling the great Austrian composer. According to one account, "Haydn, on his visit to London in 1791, [wrote] folksong arrangements, including The Ash Grove, set to words by Mrs Hunter. Haydn had designs on Mrs Hunter. Her husband ... had designs on Haydn’s famous nasal polyp. Both were refused."

Racial Studies

Hunter claimed that originally the Negroid race was White at birth, he claimed that over time because of the sun, they turned black. Hunter also claimed that blisters and burns would likely to turn white on a Negro, which he believed was evidence that the Negros original ancestors were white.

Further reading

• Dobson, Jessie. Curator Hunterian Museum. John Hunter, E&S Livingstone Ltd, Edinburgh and London, 1969, SBN 443 00647 4
• Kobler, John, The Reluctant Surgeon. A Biography of John Hunter, Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1960.
• Moore, Wendy. The Knife Man, London: Bantam, 2005, ISBN 0-593-05209-9.
• Rogers, Garet. Brother Surgeons, Corgi Books, 1962.

External links

• Detailed account of John Hunter's life and work at the 1911 Encyclopaedia
• Medical biography at whonamedit.com
• John Hunter's Treatise on Venereal Disease
• The Hunterian Museum - The Royal College of Surgeons of England, London