dozen times over, with corrections and transpositions almost without end.”
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 yearly income in 1763–1774 was never £1000; it exceeded that sum in 1778, for several years before his death was £5000, and at the time of that event had reached above £6000. All his earnings not required for domestic expenses were, during the last ten years of his life, devoted to the improvement of his museum; and his property, this excepted, was found on his decease to be barely sufficient to pay his debts. By his contemporaries generally Hunter was respected as a master of the art and science of anatomy, and as a cautious and trustworthy if not an elegant or very dexterous operator. Few, however, perceived the drift of his biological researches. Although it was admitted, even by Jesse Foot,[1] that the idea after which his unique museum had been formed—namely, that of morphology as the only true basis of a systematic zoological classification—was entirely his own, yet his investigations into the structure of the lower orders of animals were regarded as works of unprofitable curiosity. One surgeon, of no inconsiderable repute, is said to have ventured the remark that Hunter’s preparations were “just as valuable as so many pig’s pettitoes”;[2] and the president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks, writing in 1796, plainly expressed his disbelief as to the collection being “an object of importance to the general study of natural history, or indeed to any branch of science except to that of medicine.” It was “without the solace of sympathy or encouragement of approbation, without collateral assistance,”[3] and careless of achieving fame—for he held that “no man ever was a great man who wanted to be one”—that Hunter laboured to perfect his designs, and established the science of comparative anatomy, and principles which, however neglected in his lifetime, became the ground-work of all medical study and teaching.
In accordance with the directions 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 gunpowder.” 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 undertook to urge upon the government the advisability of acquiring the collection, and on the 13th of June 1799, parliament voted £15,000 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 introduced 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 twenty-four lectures[4] 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.[5] The fulfilment of these conditions was rendered possible by the receipt of fees for examinations and diplomas, under the charter by which, in 1800, 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 £15,000 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 £12,500 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 £15,000; it was opened in 1855.
The scope of Hunter’s labours may be defined as the explication of the various phases of life exhibited in organized structures, both animal and vegetable, from the simplest to the most highly differentiated. By him, therefore, comparative anatomy was employed, not in subservience to the classification of living forms, as by Cuvier, but as a means of gaining insight into the principle animating and producing these forms, by virtue of which he perceived that, however different in form and faculty, they were all allied to himself. In what does life consist? is a question which in his writings he frequently considers, and which seems to have been ever present in his mind. Life, he taught, was a principle independent of structure,[6] most tenaciously held by the least highly organized beings, but capable of readier destruction as a whole, as, e.g., by deprivation of heat or by pain, in young than in old animals. In life he beheld an agency working under the control of law, and exercising its functions in various modes and degrees. He perceived it, as Abernethy observes, to be “a great chemist,” a power capable of manufacturing a variety of substances into one kind of generally distributed nutriment, and of furnishing from this a still greater variety of dissimilar substances. Like Harvey, who terms it the anima vegetiva, he regarded it as a principle of self-preservation, which keeps the body from dissolution. Life is shown, said he, in renovation and action; but, although facilitated in its working by mechanical causes, it can exist without action, as in an egg new-laid or undergoing incubation. It is not simply a regulator of temperature; it is a principle which resists cold, conferring on the structures which it endows the capacity of passing some degrees below the freezing-point of ordinary inanimate matter without suffering congelation. Hunter found, in short, that there exists in animals a latent heat of life, set free in the process of death (see Treatise on the Blood, p. 80). Thus he observed that sap if removed from trees froze at 32° F., but within them might be fluid even at 15°; that a living snail placed in a freezing mixture acquired first a temperature of 28°, and afterwards of 32° ere it froze; and that, whereas a dead egg congealed immediately at 32°, a living egg did so only when its temperature had risen to that point after a previous fall to 29¼°. The idea that the fluid and semifluid as well as the solid constituents of the body contain the vital principle diffused through them he formed in 1755–1756, when, in making drawings illustrative of the changes that take place in the incubated egg, he noted specially that neither the white nor the yolk undergoes putrefaction. The blood he, with Harvey, considered to possess a vitality of its own, more or less independent of that of the animal in which it circulates. Life, he held, is preserved by the compound of the living body and the source of its solid constituents, the living blood. It is to the susceptibility of the latter to be converted into living organized tissue that the union of severed structures by the first intention is due. He even inclined to the belief that the chyle has life, and he considered that food becomes “animalized” in digestion. Coagulation of the blood he compared to the contraction of muscles, and believed to be an operation of life distinct from chemical coagulation, adducing in support of his opinion the fact that, in animals killed by lightning, by violent blows on the stomach, or by the exhaustion of hunting, it does not take place. “Breathing,” said Hunter, “seems to render life to the blood, and the blood continues it in every part of the body.”[7] Life, he held, could be regarded as a fire, or something similar, and might for distinction’s sake be called “animal fire.” Of this the process of respiration might afford a constant supply, the fixed life supplied to the body in the food being set free and rendered active in the lungs, whilst the air carried off that principle which encloses and retains the animal fire.[8] The living principle, said Hunter, is coeval with the existence of animal or vegetable matter itself, and may long exist without sensation. The principle upon which depends the power of sensation regulates all our external actions, as the principle of life does our internal, and the two act mutually on each other in consequence of changes produced in the brain. Something (the “materia vitae diffusa”) similar to the components of the brain (the “materia vitae coacervata”) may be supposed to be diffused through the body and even contained in the blood; between these a communication is kept up by the nerves (the “chordae internunciae”).[9] Neither a material nor a chemical theory of life, however, formed a part of Hunter’s creed. “Mere composition of matter,” he remarked, “does not give life; for the dead body has all the composition it ever had; life is a property we do not understand; we can only see the necessary leading steps towards it.”[10] As from life only, said he in one of his lectures, we can gain an idea of death, so from death only we gain an idea of life. Life, being an agency leading to, but not consisting of, any modification of matter, “either is something superadded to matter, or else consists in a peculiar arrangement of certain fine particles of matter, which being thus disposed acquire the properties of life.” As a bar of iron may gain magnetic virtue by being placed for a time in a special position, so perhaps the particles of matter arranged and long continued in a certain posture eventually gain the power of life. “I enquired of Mr Hunter,” writes one of his pupils,[11] “if this did not make for the Exploded Doctrine of Equivocal
- ↑ See p. 266 of his malicious so-called Life of John Hunter (1794).
- ↑ Cf. J. H. Green, Hunt. Orat., 1840, p. 27.
- ↑ Abernethy, Physiological Lectures, p. 11 (1817).
- ↑ Instituted in 1806.
- ↑ Increased to seventeen in 1856.
- ↑ How clearly he held this view is seen in his remark (Treatise on the Blood, p. 28, cf. p. 46) that, as the coagulating lymph of the blood is probably common to all animals, whereas the red corpuscles are not, we must suppose the lymph to be the essential part of that fluid. Hunter was the first to discover that the blood of the embryos of red-blooded animals is at first colourless, resembling that of invertebrates. (See Owen, Preface to vol. iv. of Works, p. xiii.)
- ↑ Treatise on the Blood, p. 63.
- ↑ Essays and Observations, i. 113.
- ↑ Treatise on the Blood, p. 89.
- ↑ Ib. p. 90.
- ↑ P. P. Staple, with the loan of whose volume of MS. notes of Hunter’s “Chirurgical Lectures,” dated, on the last page, Sept. 20th, 1787, the writer was favoured by Sir W. H. Broadbent.
