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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] John Hunter Biography HUNTER, John (1728–93). A celebrated English physiologist and surgeon, born at Long Calderwood, Glasgow, Scotland, the youngest of 10 children. After a deficient primary education he was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker; but in 1748 he began to make up deficiencies in his education and applied himself to anatomy under his brother’s tuition. During this period he demonstrated the manner of the descent of the testis to the scrotum in fœtal life, studied the placental circulation, traced the distribution of the olfactory nerve in the nose, and, with his brother William, elucidated the function of the lymphatic system. He studied under Cheselden at Chelsea Hospital and under Pott between 1749 and 1753 and at Oxford from 1753 to 1754, became a hospital pupil in surgery in 1754, and was made house surgeon at St. George’s Hospital in 1756. He joined the army as staff surgeon, serving in France and Portugal from 1761 to 1763; practiced surgery in London from 1763; was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1767; became surgeon to St. George’s Hospital in 1768, surgeon extraordinary to the King in 1776, and deputy surgeon-general to the army in 1786. He received the Copley medal from the Royal Society in 1787. Hunter was an indefatigable student of comparative anatomy, physiology, and botany. At his house at Earl’s Court, from 1772 until his death, he kept and studied creatures from all quarters of the globe. Fishes, birds, lizards, hedgehogs, silkworms, leopards, hornets, and wasps are mentioned among the objects of his study and observation. He lodged shot in the leg bones of young pigs at definite distances and then fed them with madder, which stains living and growing tissues, and demonstrated the manner in which bones grow. He first discovered the principle of compensatory development of blood vessels under the "stimulus of necessity." He tied the common carotid artery of a buck and noted that cutting off its main blood supply did not materially interfere with its growth and development. Dissection of the animal later showed that small branches above and below the place of tying had enlarged sufficiently to meet the physiological demand. This discovery emboldened him to ligate the great arterial trunks in cases of aneurism, relying on the establishment of collateral circulation to prevent death of the limb. His first operation on this theory was a ligation of the femoral artery, for aneurism, in the fibrous sheath (still known as Hunter’s canal) where it passes through the muscles of the thigh. He is said to have dissected over 500 different species of animals, many of them repeatedly. Hunter died in his sixty-fifth year, of a spasmodic heart attack brought on by a somewhat acrimonious discussion at a board meeting, over the admission of pupils to St. George’s Hospital. He was of a warm temperament and was subject in his later years to such attacks. He was a man of great industry, the boldest and best operative surgeon of his day as well as the greatest’ anatomist known and a marvelous zoölogist. His museum contained at the time of his death 10,563 specimens and preparations illustrative of human and comparative anatomy, physiology, pathology, and natural history. He died in comparative poverty, and his collection was purchased, two years after his death, by the government for £15,000 and was presented to the Royal College of Surgeons. In addition to numerous papers contributed to the Transactions of the Royal and other learned societies, he published the following independent works: A Treatise on the Natural History of the Human Teeth (part i, 1771; part ii, 1778); A Treatise on the Venereal Disease (1786); Observations on Certain Parts of the Animal Economy (1786); A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gunshot Wounds (1794). The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XI. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 612-613. |