HUNTER, JOHN (1728-1793), British physiologist and surgeon, was born on Feb. 13, 1728, at Long Calderwood, in the parish of East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, being the youngest of the ten children of John and Agnes Hunter. His father, who died on Oct. 3o, 1741, aged 78, was descended from the old Ayrshire family of Hunter of Hunterston; his mother, nee Paul, came from Glasgow. Young Hunter worked for some time at cabinet-making, under his brother-in-law, but presently obtained from his brother William (q.v.) permission to aid, under Mr. Symonds, in making dissections in his anatomical school, then the most celebrated in London, intending, should he be unsuccessful there, to enter the army. He arrived in London in September 1748, about a fort night before the beginning of his brother's autumnal course of lectures.
Hard-working, and singularly patient and skilful in dissection, Hunter had by his second winter in London acquired sufficient anatomical knowledge to be entrusted with the charge of his brother's practical class. In the summer months of 1749-1750, at Chelsea Military Hospital, he attended the lectures and opera tions of William Cheselden, on whose retirement in the following year he became a surgeon's pupil at St. Bartholomew's where Percivall Pott was one of the senior surgeons. In 1754 he became a surgeon's pupil at St. George's Hospital, where he was appointed house-surgeon in 1756. During the period of his connection with Dr. Hunter's school he solved the problem of the descent of the testes in the foetus, traced the ramifications of the nasal and olfactory nerves within the nose, experimentally tested the ques tion whether veins could act as absorbents, studied the formation of pus and the nature of the placental circulation, and with his brother earned the chief merit of practically proving the function and importance of the lymphatics in the animal economy. On June 5, he entered as a gentleman commoner at St. Mary's Hall, Oxford, but his instincts would not permit him, to use his own expression, "to stuff Latin and Greek at the university." An attack of inflammation of the lungs in the spring of having produced symptoms threatening consumption, Hunter obtained in October 1760 the appointment of staff-surgeon in Hodgson and Keppel's expedition to Belleisle. With this he sailed in 1761. In the following year he served with the English forces on the frontier of Portugal. Whilst with the army he acquired the extensive knowledge of gunshot wounds embodied in his im portant treatise (1794) on that subject. When not engaged in the active duties of his profession, he occupied himself with physio logical and other scientific researches. Thus, in 1761, off Belleisle, the conditions of the coagulation of the blood were among the subjects of his inquiries. Later, on land, he continued the study of human anatomy, and arranged his notes and memoranda on in flammation ; he also ascertained by experiment that digestion does not take place in snakes and lizards during hibernation, and observed that enforced vigorous movement at that season proves fatal to such animals, the waste so occasioned not being corn pensated, whence he drew the inference that, in the diminution of the power of a part attendant on mortification, resort to stimu lants which increase action without giving real strength is in advisable. A ms. catalogue by Hunter, probably written soon after his return from Portugal, shows that he had already made a collection of about two hundred specimens of natural and morbid structures.
On arriving in England early in 1763, Hunter, having retired from the army on half-pay, took a house in Golden Square, and began to practise as a surgeon. Most of the metropolitan practice at the time was held by P. Pott, C. Hawkins, Samuel Sharp, Joseph Warner and Robert Adair; and Hunter sought to eke out his at first slender income by teaching practical anatomy and operative surgery to a private class. His leisure was devoted to the study of comparative anatomy, to procure subjects for which he obtained the refusal of animals dying in the Tower menagerie and in various travelling zoological collections. In connection with his rupture of a tendo Achillis, in 1767, he performed on dogs several experiments which, with the illustrations in his museum of the reunion of such structures after division, laid the foundation of the modern practice of cutting through tendons (tenotomy) for the relief of distorted and contracted joints. In the same year he was elected F.R.S.
His first contribution to the Philosophical Transactions, with the exception of a supplement to a paper by J. Ellis in the volume for 1766, was an essay (June 18, 1772) on post-mortem digestion of the stomach, written at the request of Sir J. Pringle, in which he explained that phenomenon as a result of the action of the gastric juice. The subjects and dates of his subsequent papers in the Transactions, the titles of which give little notion of the rich ness of their contents, are as follows : The torpedo (17 73) ; air receptacles in birds, and the Gillaroo trout (17 74) ; the Gymnotus electricus, and the production of heat by animals and vegetables (supplemented in 1777), 0775); the recovery of people appar ently drowned (1776); the free martin (1779); the communica tion of smallpox to the foetus in utero, and the occurrence of male plumage in old hen pheasants (1780) ; the organ of hearing in fishes (1782) ; the anatomy of a "new marine animal" described by Home (1785) ; the specific identity of the wolf, jackal and dog (supplemented in 1789), the effect on fertility of extirpation of one ovarium, and the structure and economy of whales (1787) ; observations on bees ; and some remarkable caves in Bayreuth and fossil bones found therein (1794)• With these may be included a paper by Home, from materials supplied by Hunter, on certain horny excrescences of the human body.
On Dec. 9, 1768 he was elected a surgeon to St. George's Hos pital, and, soon after, a member of the Corporation of Surgeons.
He now began to take house-pupils. Among these were Edward Jenner, who became a friend and correspondent, W. Guy, Dr. P. S. Physick of Philadelphia and Everard Home, his brother-in-law. William Lynn and Sir A. Carlisle, though not inmates of his house, were frequent visitors there. His pupils at St. George's included John Abernethy, Henry Cline, James Earle and Astley Cooper. In 1770 he settled in Jermyn Street, in the house which his brother William had previously occupied; and in July 1771 he married Anne, the eldest daughter of Robert Home, surgeon to Burgoyne's regiment of light horse'.
From 1772 till his death Hunter resided during autumn at a house built by him at Earl's Court, Brompton, where most of his biological researches were carried on. There he kept for the purpose of study and experiment the fishes, lizards, blackbirds, hedgehogs and other animals sent him from time to time by Jenner; tame pheasants and partridges, at least one eagle, toads, silkworms and many more creatures, obtained from every quarter of the globe. Bees he had under observation in his conservatory for upwards of twenty years; hornets and wasps were also dili gently studied by him. On two occasions his life was in risk from his pets—once in wrestling with a young bull, and again when he fearlessly took back to their dens two leopards which had broken loose among his dogs.
Hunter, ever cautious of confounding fact and hypothesis, be sought of nature the truth through the medium of experiments and observations. "He had never read Bacon," says G. G. Bab ington, "but his mode of studying nature was as strictly Baconian as if he had." To Jenner, who had offered a conjectural explana tion of a phenomenon, he writes, on the 2nd of August 1775: "I think your solution is just; but why think? why not try the experiment? Repeat all the experiments upon a hedgehog as soon as you receive this, and they will give you the solution." It was his axiom however, "that experiments should not be often re peated which tend merely to establish a principle already known and admitted, but that the next step should be the application of that principle to useful purposes" ("Anim. Oecon.," Works, iv. 86). In his toxicological and other researches, in which his experience had led him to believe that the effects of noxious drugs are nearly similar in the brute creation and in man, he had already, in 178o, as he states, "poisoned some thousands of animals." In 1772 Hunter, in order effectually to gauge the extent of his own knowledge, and also correctly to express his views, which had been repeatedly misstated or ascribed to others, began his lectures on the theory and practice of surgery. Though Pott, indeed had perceived that the only true system of surgery is that which most closely accords with the curative efforts of nature, a rational pathology can hardly be said to have had at this time any existence; and it was generally assumed that a knowledge of anatomy alone was a sufficient foundation for the study of sur gery. Hunter, unlike his contemporaries, to most of whom his philosophic habit of thought was a mystery, and whose books con tained little else than relations of cases and modes of treatment, sought the reason for each phenomenon that came under his notice. The principles of surgery, he maintained, are not less necessary to be understood than the principles of other sciences; unless, indeed, the surgeon should wish to resemble "the Chinese philosopher whose knowledge consisted only in facts." Too much attention, he remarked, cannot be paid to facts; yet a multitude of facts overcrowd the memory without advantage if they do not lead us to establish principles, by an acquaintance with which we learn the causes of diseases. Hunter's course, which latterly com prised eighty-six lectures, delivered on alternate evenings between the hours of seven and eight, lasted from October to April. Some teachers of his time were content to dismiss the subject of anatomy and surgery in a course of only six weeks' duration. His 'Mrs. Hunter died on Jan. 7, 1821, in Holies Street, Cavendish Square, London, in her seventy-ninth year. The words for Haydn's English canzonets were supplied by her, and were mostly original poems ; of these the lines beginning "My mother bids me bind my hair" are, from the beauty of the accompanying music, among the best known. (See R. Nares in Gent. Mag. xci. pt. 1, p. 89, quoted in Nichols's Lit. Antic., 2nd ser.. vii. 618.) class was usually small and never exceeded thirty. He was de ficient in the gifts of a good extempore speaker, being in this respect a remarkable contrast to his brother William; and he read his lectures, seldom raising his eyes from the manuscript. His manner with his auditory is stated to have been embarrassed and awkward, and his language always unadorned; but that "his ex pressions for the explaining of his new theories rendered his lectures often unintelligible" is scarcely evident in his pupils' notes still extant. 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 cater pillar 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 178o, 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," for the Transactions of which he wrote many papers. In 1783 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 £3,000, a museum for his anatomical and other col lections which by 1782 had cost him £Io,000. The new edifice consisted of a hall 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.
In May 1785, Hunter sat to Sir Joshua Reynolds for his por trait. He proved a bad sitter, and Reynolds made little satis factory 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." The painter then sketched out the admirable portrait which is in the possession of the Royal College of Surgeons. Among the subjects of Hunter's physiological investi gation in 1785 was the mode of growth of deer's antlers. By experiment on a buck he found that under "the stimulus of necessity," to use a phrase of the experimenter, the smaller arterial channels are capable of rapid increase in dimensions to perform the offices of the larger'. It happened that, in the en suing December, there lay in one of the wards of St. George's Hospital a patient admitted for popliteal aneurism. Should the surgeon, following the usual and commonly fatal method of treat ment, cut down upon the tumour, and, after tying the artery above and below it, evacuate its contents? Or should he adopt his Treatise on the Blood, p. 288, Hunter observes: "We find it a common principle in the animal machine, that every part increases in some degree according to the action required. Thus we find . . vessels become larger in proportion to the necessity of supply, as for instance, in the gravid uterus ; the external carotids in the stag, also, when his horns are growing, are much larger than at any other time.
the procedure, deemed by Pott generally advisable, of amputating the limb above it? It was Hunter's aim in his practice, even if he could not dis pense with the necessity, at least to diminish the severity of operations, which he considered were an acknowledgment of the imperfection of the art of healing, and compared to "the acts of the armed savage, who attempts to get that by force which a civilized man would get by stratagem." Since, he argued, the experiment with the buck had shown that collateral vessels are capable of continuing the circulation when passage through a main trunk is arrested, why should he not, in the aneurism case, leaving the absorbents to deal with the contents of the tumour, tie the in the sound parts, where it is tied in amputation, and preserve the limb? Acting upon this idea, he ligatured his patient's femoral artery in the lower part of its course in the thigh, in the fibrous sheath enclosing the space since known as "Hunter's canal." The leg was found, some hours after the operation, to have acquired a temperature even above the normal. At the end of January 1786, that is, in six weeks' time, the patient was well enough to be able to leave the hospital. Thus Hunter inaugurated an operation which has been the means of preserving to hundreds life with integrity of limb.
Early in 1786 Hunter published his Treatise on the Venereal Disease, which, like some of his previous writings, was printed in his own house. Towards the end of the year appeared his Obser vations on certain parts of the Animal Oeconomy, which, besides the more important of his contributions to the Philosophical Transactions, contains nine papers on various subjects. In 1786 Hunter became deputy surgeon-general to the army; his appoint ment as surgeon-general and as inspector-general of hospitals fol lowed in 1790. In 1787 he received the Royal Society's Copley medal, and was also elected a member of the American Philo sophical society. On account of the increase in his practice and his impaired health, he now obtained the services of Home as his assistant at St. George's Hospital. The death of Pott in December 1788 secured to him the undisputed title of the first surgeon in England. He resigned to Home, in 1792, the delivery of his surgical lectures, in order to devote himself more fully to the completion of his Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation and Gun shot Wounds, which was published by his executors in 1794. In this, his masterpiece, the application of physiology to practice is especially noticeable. Certain experiments described in the first part, which demonstrate that arterialization of the blood in respira tion takes place by a process of diffusion of "pure air" or "vital air" (i.e., oxygen) through membrane, were made as early as the summer of 1755.
Hunter died on Oct. 16, while attending a board meeting at St. George's Hospital. His remains were interred privately on Oct. 22, in the vaults of St. Martin's in the Fields. Thence, on March 28, 1859, through the instrumentality of F. T. Buckland, they were removed to Abbot Islip's chapel in Westminster Abbey, to be finally deposited in the grave in the north aisle of the nave, close to the resting-place of Ben Jonson.
To attempt to set forth what in Hunter's teaching was new to pathology and systematic surgery, or was rendered so by his mode of treatment, would be well-nigh to present an epitome of all that he wrote on those subjects. "When we make a discovery in pathology," says Adams, writing in 1818, "we only learn what we have overlooked in his writings or forgotten in his lectures." Surgery, which only in 1745 had formally ceased to be associated with "the art and mystery of barbers," he raised to the rank of a scientific profession. His doctrines were, necessarily, not those of his age : while lesser minds around him were still dim with the mists of the ignorance and dogmatism of times past, his lofty intellect was illumined by the dawn of a distant day.
Hunter was of about medium height, strongly built and high shouldered and short-necked. He had an open countenance, and large features, eyes light-blue or grey, eyebrows prominent, and hair reddish-yellow in youth, later white, and worn curled behind; and he dressed plainly and neatly. He rose at or before six, dis sected till nine (his breakfast hour), received patients from half past nine till twelve, at least during the latter part of his life, and saw his outdoor and hospital patients till about four, when he dined, taking, according to Home, as at other meals in the twenty years preceding his death, no wine. After dinner he slept an hour; he then superintended experiments, read or prepared his lectures, and made, usually by means of an amanuensis, records of the day's dissections. "I never could understand," says W. Clift, "how Mr. Hunter obtained rest : when I left him at mid night, it was with a lamp fresh trimmed for further study, and with the usual appointment to meet him again at six in the morn ing." H. Leigh Thomas records that, on his first arrival in London, having by desire called on Hunter at five o'clock in the morning, he found him already busily engaged in the dissection of insects. Rigidly economical of time, Hunter was always at work, and he had always in view some fresh enterprise. To his museum he gave a very large share of his attention, being fearful lest the ordering of it should be incomplete at his death, and knowing of none who could continue his work for him. At the time of his death he had anatomized over 5oo different species of animals, some of them repeatedly, and had made numerous dissections of plants. The manuscript works by him, appropriated and destroyed by Home, among which were his eighty-six surgical lectures, all in full, are stated to have been "literally a cartload"; and many pages of his records were written by Clift under his directions "at least half a dozen times over, with corrections and trans positions almost without end." The Hunterian Collections.—In accordance with the direc tions given by Hunter in his will, his collection was offered for purchase to the British government. But the prime minister, Pitt, on being asked to consider the matter, exclaimed : "What ! buy preparations ! Why, I have not money enough to purchase gun powder." He, however, consented to the bestowal of a portion of the king's bounty for a couple of years on Mrs. Hunter and her two surviving children. In 1796 Lord Auckland urged upon the government the advisability of acquiring the collection, and on June parliament voted I15,000 for this purpose. Its custodianship, after refusal by the College of Physicians, was unanimously accepted by the Corporation of Surgeons on the terms proposed. These were in brief—that the collection be open four hours in the forenoon, two days every week, for the inspection and consultation of the fellows of the College of Physicians, the members of the Company of Surgeons and persons properly intro duced by them, a catalogue of the preparations and an official to explain it being at those times always at hand ; that a course of not less than 24 lectures on comparative anatomy and other subjects illustrated by the collection be given every year by some member of the Company; and that the preparations be kept in good preservation at the expense of the Corporation, and be subject to the superintendence of a board of sixteen trustees.
The fulfilment of these conditions was rendered possible by the receipt of fees for examinations and diplomas, under the charter by which, in 180o, the Corporation was constituted the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1806 the collection was placed in temporary quarters in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the sum of I15,000 was voted by parliament for the erection of a proper and commodious building for its preservation and extension. This was followed by a grant of I12,500 in 1807. The collection was removed in 1812 to the new museum, and opened to visitors in 1813. The greater part of the present edifice was built in 1835, at an expense to the college of about £40,000; and the combined Hunterian and collegiate collections, having been rearranged in what are now termed the western and middle museums, were in 1836 made accessible to the public. The erection of the eastern museum in 1852, on premises in Portugal Street, bought in 1847 for £16,000, cost £25,000, of which parliament granted I15,000 ; it was opened in 1855.