Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/402

388 388 HUNTER theatre, and a room used subsequently for the meetings of the Lycpeum Medicum, a society instituted by Hunter and Fordyce. In April 1785 Hunter s collections were removed into it under the superintendence of Home and Bell, 1 and another assistant, Andre&quot;. Among the foreigners of dis tinction that inspected the museum, which was now shown by Hunter twice a year, in October to medical men, and in May to other visitors, were Blumenbach, Camper, Poli, and Scarpa, In the acquisition of subjects for his varied biological investigations and of specimens for his museum, expense was a matter of small moment with Hunter. Thus a&amp;lt;t one time he endeavoured, at his own cost, to obtain in formation respecting the Cetacea by sending out a surgeon to the North in a Greenland whaler, He is said, moreover, to have given, in June 1783, no less than 500 for the body of O Brien, or Byrne, the Irish giant, whose skeleton, 7 feet 7 inches high, is so conspicuous an object in the museum of the College of Surgeons of London. 2 Hunter, who in the spring of 1769-72 had suffered from gout, in spring 1773 from spasm apparently in the pyloric region, accompanied by failure of the heart s action (Ottley, Life, p. 44), and in 1777 from vertigo with symptoms of angina pectoris, had in 1783 another attack of the last mentioned complaint, to which he was henceforward subject when under anxiety or excitement of mind. In May 1785, 3 chiefly to oblige Sharp the engraver, Hunter consented to have his portrait taken by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He proved a bad sitter, and Reynolds made but 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 &quot; the body loses the consciousness of its own existence.&quot; 4 The painter had now before him the man he would fain depict, and, turning his canvas upside down, he sketched out the admirable portrait which, since most skilfully restored by Mr H. Farrar, is in the possession of the Royal College of Surgeons. A copy of the same, by Jackson, acquired from Lady Bell, is to be seen at the National- Portrait Gallery in South Kensington. St Mary s Hall, Oxford, also possesses a copy. Sharp s engraving of the original, published in 1788, is one of the finest of his productions. The volumes seen in Reynolds s picture are a portion of the unpublished records of anato mical researches left by Hunter at his death, which, with other manuscripts, Sir Everard Home in 1812 removed from his museum, and eventually, in order, it has been supposed, to keep secret the source of many of his papers in the Philosophical Transactions, and of facts mentioned in his lectures, committed to the flames. 5 1 Bel] lived with Hunter fourteen years, i.e., from 1775 to 1789, and was employed by him chiefly in making and drawing anatomical pre parations for the museum. He died in 1792 at Sumatra, where he was assistant-surgeon to the East India Company. 2 O Brien, dreading dissection by Hunter, had shortly before his death arranged with several of his countrymen that his corpse should be conveyed by them to the sea, and sunk in deep water ; but his undertaker, who had entered into a pecuniary compact with the great anatomist, managed that while the escort was drinking at a certain stage on the march seawards, the coffin should be locked up in a barn. There some men he had concealed speedily substituted an equivalent weight of paving-stones for the body, which was at night forwarded to Hunter, and by him taken in his carriage to Earl s Court, and, to avoid risk of a discovery, immediately after suitable division boiled to obtain the bones. See Tom Taylor, Leicester Square, chap. xiv. , 1874; cf. Annual Register, xxvi. 209, 1783. 3 See C. R. Leslie and Tom Taylor, Life and Times of Sir J. Reynolds, ii. 474, 1865. 4 Works, i. 265-266. 5 A transcript of a portion of Hunter s MSS., made by Clift in 1793 and 1800, was edited by Professor Owen, in two volumes with notes, in 1861, under the title of Essays and Observations in Natural His tory, Anatomy, Physiology, Psychology, and Geology. On the destruc tion of Hunter s papers see Cliffs &quot;Appendix &quot; in vol. ii. p. 497, also Brof. flower, Introd. Led., 7-9, 1870. Among the subjects of Hunter s physiological investiga tions in 1785 was the mode of growth of deer s antlers. As he possessed the privilege of making experiments on the deer in Richmond Park, he in July of that year had a buck there caught and thrown, and tied one of its external carotid arteries. He observed that the antler which obtained its blood supply therefrom, then half-grown, became in consequence cold to the touch. Hunter debated with himself whether it would be shed in due time, or be longer retained than ordinarily. To his surprise he found, on re-examining the antler a week or two later, when the wound around the ligatured artery was healed, that it had regained its warmth, and was still increasing in size. Had, then, his operation been in some way defective 1 ? To determine this question, the buck was killed and sent to Leicester Fields. 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 &quot; the stimulus of necessity,&quot; 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. 6 It happened that, in the ensuing December, there lay in one of the wards of St George s Hospital a patient of Hunter s, admitted for popliteal aneurism. The disease must soon prove fatal unless by some means arrested. Should the surgeon, following the usual and commonly fatal method of treatment, cut down upon the tumour, and, after tying the artery above and below it, evacuate its con tents 1 Or should he adopt 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 &quot; the acts of the armed savage, who attempts to get that by force which a civilized man would get by stratagem.&quot; Since, he argued, the experiment with the buck had shown that collateral vessels are capable of continuing the circula tion when passage through a main trunk is arrested, why should he not, in his aneurism case, leaving the absorbents to deal with the contents of the tumour, tie the artery in the sound parts, where it is tied in amputation, and preserve the limb 1 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 &quot; Hunter s canal.&quot; 7 The leg was found, some hours after the operation, to have acquired a temperature even above the normal. 8 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 it was that Hunter inaugu rated an operation which has been the means of pre serving to hundreds life with integrity of limb an operation which, as the Italian Assalini, who saw it first performed, testifies, &quot; excited the greatest wonder, 6 In his Treatise on the Blood, p. 288, Hunter observes : &quot; 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.&quot; See Professor Owen, &quot;John Hunter and Vivisection,&quot; Brit. Med. Journ., February 22, 1879, p. 284. In the fourth of his operations for popliteal aneurism, Hunter for the first time did not include the vein in the ligature. His patient lived for fifty years afterwards. The results on the artery of this operation are to be seen in specimen 3472.4 (Path. Ser. ) in the Hunterian Museum. 8 Home, Trans, of Soc. for Impr. of Med. and Chirurg. Knoui., . 147, 1793. Excess of heat in the injured limb was noticed also in Hunter s second case on the day after the operation ; and in his fourth case it reached 4,-5 on the first day, and continued during a fortnight.