Chapter 34

EVOLUTION OF A SURGEON

AMONG the great surgeons of yesterday, there probably is none more honoured by the surgeons of today than John Hunter; yet how he became a surgeon nobody seems to know. Of degrees and diplomas he knew nothing. He became a surgeon by the simple process of practising surgery.

We catch our first glimpse of him as a red-headed, freckle-faced youngster driving his cows into the thatched farmhouse at Long Calderwood in Lanarkshire. He was the tenth child of his parents who secretly felt that the home was already a trifle overcrowded. In deciding on a vocation, they agreed that Johnnie must take pot luck. Willie and Jimmie had set their hearts on going to college; they could not indulge the luxury of three scholars in the family. In due time, however, Willie, Jimmie and Johnnie all became doctors, Johnnie the most illustrious of the three.

At seventeen, John forsook his cows at Calderwood for cabinet-making in Glasgow. Three years later, hearing of Willie’s progress in his profession, John begged that he might be permitted to exercise his craftsmanship as a cabinet-maker in the dissection of human bodies in his brother’s anatomical school.

William soon became convinced that John had a natural flair for all kinds of experiments upon the human frame; the youth quickly became popular with everybody about the place. He acquired special renown for the skill with which he beat down the prices of the resurrection men, obtaining the ghastly trophies of their nocturnal raids on the churchyards at pries at which such treasure had never been obtained before.

Recognizing that his young brother was a born surgeon, William advised him to pursue his studies along orthodox lines, and, at the age of twenty-seven, John went up to Oxford.

But, after a couple of months, he relinquished the project as just so much tomfoolery. ‘How,’ he demanded, ‘will a headful of Greek roots and Latin conjugations help me to operate for popliteal aneurism?’

Later in life, when he was told that Jesse Foot had sneered at his ignorance of the dead languages, he retorted that he might not know much about dead languages, but he could teach things about dead bodies that Jesse Foot had never learned in any language, living or dead.

Always somewhat brusque and perhaps a trifle unmannerly, John Hunter lived to become the most eminent surgeon of his day. He was fifty-five when he bought the pretentious mansions in Leicester Square which, because of the array of splendid equipages always at his doors, earned for him the nickname of the Golden Calf of Leicester Square.

Mr. Ernest A. Gray, who has recently produced an excellent biography of Hunter, stresses the consistently practical side of the great man’s work. He always sniffed at abstract theories. If in discussing a case with another surgeon, his companion said that he thought that this, that, or the other might be done, Hunter would snort: ‘Why think? Let’s try it!’ He kept a huge menagerie of animals, birds, reptiles and fishes, and obtained the right to experiment upon the creatures in the various parks, shows, gardens and zoos. In testing the qualities of certain drugs he poisoned thousands of animals but he gained the knowledge for which he was groping.

He died very suddenly at the age of sixty-five, at the exact moment at which the unhappy Marie Antoinette was guillotined in Paris. In a heated argument with his colleagues, he slumped forward and was gone. He was buried in the vaults of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, and for a long time the exact place of his sepulture was unknown. Sixty-six years later, however, Frank Buckland, the eminent naturalist, who always regarded Hunter as ‘the greatest of Englishmen’, located the coffin, and with every pomp and circumstance, it was reinterred in Westminster Abbey.

With his passion for ocular demonstration and practical experiment, it was natural that John Hunter should have a colossal and valuable collection of specimens. Within half a century of his death, Parliament voted about £50,000 for the acquisition and accommodation of his museum. Mr. Gray claims that his hero lifted surgery to a science. As long as the world lasts, he says, the burly shadow of John Hunter will fall athwart every operating theatre, hospital ward, and biological laboratory. It is a noble tribute, nobly earned.

By Dr. F. W. Boreham