Hunter and his Times
THERE is probably nothing new to be said about John Hunter. Every year, for many decades, a Hunterian Oration has been read by a selected orator before the Royal College of Surgeons,. and a similar annual oration has been listened to by the members of the Hunterian Society. In the preparation of these, the biographies of him and his hardly less illustrious brother William, the various histories of medicine and surgery in which his must be an inevitable name, every possible cranny that might conceivably disclose an overlooked relic or reference must have been searched and ransacked over and over again. And yet, while no other man in the English-speaking medical world has been so long and so often commemorated, the general public may well remain puzzled why this should have been the case.
Even to students of the eighteenth century, who have met him as a leading contemporary surgeon, the friend and neighbour in Leicester Square of Joshua Reynolds, who painted his portrait, and Surgeon-extraordinary to King George III, this continuing post- humous fame may seem a little hard to explain. And the probable reason is that Hunter cannot be easily coupled, as can Jenner, Simpson and Lister, with any single outstanding peak of discovery or reform. This was partly because he was too protean in his activities for that particular kind of reward. It would not be true, or it would only be half-true, to say that he was greater than anything he did. If almost any line of progress in surgery or biology is traced back, Hunter will be found as one of its progenitors, suggesters, or prophets. The task he set himself was to enunciate, -to -practise and then to teach principles, to substitute observation and experiment for mere custom and guess-work. And what he did, in one relatively short but crowded life-time, was to lead surgery into the promised land. He found it a trade and left it a science.
Fully to understand, therefore, his greatnes it is necessary to know something about the background against which he worked, and Mr. Gray, in his present biography, has evidently realised this need. Here and there, perhaps, he has allowed his imagination the role of a novelist rather than that of a historian. It is a trifle far- fetched, perhaps to depict him on Highgate Hill, after a two weeks' journey from Scotland, with " the straw of the midden still sticking to his boots," and not all the contemporary detail is strictly relevant to the portrait. But Mr. Gray, as his bibliography shows, has been diligent to master all the known facts, and he has assembled them with skill. To the non-medical reader, perplexed by Hunter's renown, his book should prove both engrossing and explanatory.
H. H. BASHFORD.
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