Francis Henry Butler

“ 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 ”

“ 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) . ”

“ 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.” [34] Life, he held, could be regarded as a fire, or something similar, and might for distinction’s sake be called “animal fire.” ”

“ 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 comprised 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 subjects of anatomy and surgery in a course of only six weeks’ duration. ”

“ Choosing intuitively the only true method of philosophical discovery, Hunter, ever cautious of confounding fact and hypothesis, besought of nature the truth through the medium of manifold experiments and observations. “He had never read Bacon,” says G. G. Babington, “but his mode of studying nature was as strictly Baconian as if he had.” [11] To Jenner, who had offered a conjectural explanation 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? ”

“ On examination Hunter ascertained that the external carotid had been duly tied, but that certain small branches of the artery above and below the ligature had enlarged, and by their anastomoses had restored the blood supply of the growing part. Thus it was evident 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. [23] It happened that, in the ensuing December, there lay in one of the wards of St George’s Hospital a patient admitted for popliteal aneurism. ”

“ Life, he taught, was a principle independent of structure, [33] 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. ”

“ If we were capable of following the progress of increase of the number of the parts of the most perfect animal, as they first formed in succession, from the very first, to its state of full perfection, we should probably be able to compare it with some one of the incomplete animals themselves, of every order of animals in the creation, being at no stage different from some of those inferior orders ”

“ In May 1785, [20] chiefly to oblige William Sharp the engraver, Hunter consented to have his portrait taken by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He proved a bad sitter, and Reynolds made little satisfactory 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ H. Leigh Thomas records [27] 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. ”

“ 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 operations 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 the summer of 1752 he visited Scotland. ”

“ To exemplify the differences between organic and inorganic growth, Hunter made and employed in his lectures a collection of crystallized specimens of minerals, or, as he termed them, “natural or native fossils.” Of fossils, designated by him “extraneous fossils,” because extraneous respecting the rocks in which they occur, he recognized the true nature, and he arranged them according to a system agreeing with that adopted for recent organisms. ”

“ Hunter considered that very few fossils of those that resemble recent forms are identical with them. He conceived that the latter might be varieties, but that if they are really different species, then “we must suppose that a new creation must have taken place.” ”

“ Against this innovation, however, the governors of the hospital decided in March 1793. Subsequently, by a committee of their appointing, a code of rules respecting pupils was promulgated, one clause of which, probably directed against an occasional practice of Hunter’s, stipulated that no person should be admitted as a student of the hospital without certificates that he had been educated for the medical profession. In the autumn two young Scotchmen, ignorant of the new rule, came up to town and applied to Hunter for admission as his pupils at St George’s. ”

“ 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.” [17] It appears from a letter by Hunter that in the latter part of 1783, he, with Jenner, had the subject of colour-blindness under consideration. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 Gunshot Wounds, which was published by his executors in 1794. ”

“ Another experiment of his, which required many trials for success, was the engrafting of a human incisor on the comb of a cock. [15] The uniting of parts of different animals when brought into contact he attributed to the production of adhesive instead of suppurative inflammation, owing to their possession of “the simple living principle.” [16] The effects of habit upon structure were illustrated by Hunter’s observation that in a sea-gull which he had brought to feed on barley the muscular parietes of the gizzard became greatly thickened. ”

“ 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, [38] “if this did not make for the Exploded Doctrine of Equivocal Generation: he told me perhaps it did, and that as to Equivocal Generation all we cd have was negative Proofs of its not taking Place. ”

“ Lect., pp. 7-9 (1870) . ↑ In 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.” ↑ See Sir R. Owen, “John Hunter and Vivisection,” Brit. ”

“ The Hunterian Oration, instituted in 1813 by Dr Matthew Baillie and Sir Everard Home, is delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons on the 14th of February, which Hunter used to give as the anniversary of his birth. ↑ Ottley’s date, 1738, is inaccurate, see S. F. Simmons, Account of ... W. Hunter, p. 7. Hunter’s mother died on the 3rd of November 1751, aged 66. ↑ So in Home’s Life, p. xvi., and Ottley’s, p. 15. Hunter himself (Treatise on the Blood, p. 62) mentions the date 1755. ”