Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/406

392 392 H U N~H U N naval practitioners, of a series of lectures on operative surgery, and so satisfactorily did he acquit himself of his task that he was requested to include anatomy in his course. It was not long before he attained considerable fame as a lecturer ; for not only was his oratorical ability great, but he differed from his contemporaries in the fulness and thoroughness of his teaching, and in the care which he took to provide for his hearers the best possible practical illustrations of his discourses. We read that the syllabus of Mr Nourse, published in 1748, &quot; totam rem anatomicam complectens,&quot; comprised only twenty-three lectures, exclu sive of a short and defective &quot; Syllabus Chirurgicus,&quot; and that at &quot; one of the most reputable courses of anatomy in Europe,&quot; which Hunter had himself attended, the professor was obliged to demonstrate all the parts of the body, except the nerves and vessels (shown in a foetus) and the bones, on a single dead subject, and for the explanation of the operations of surgery used a dog ! In 1747 Hunter became a member of the Corporation of Surgeons. In the course of a tour through Holland to Paris with his pupil J. Douglas in 1728, he visited Albinus at Leyden, and inspected with admiration his injected preparations. By degrees Hunter renounced surgical for obstetric practice, in which he ex celled. He was appointed a surgeon-accoucheur at the Middlesex Hospital in 1748, and at the British Lying-in Hospital in the year following. The degree of M.D. was conferred upon him by the university of Glasgow, October 24, 1750. About the same time he left his old abode at Mrs Douglas s, and settled as a physician in Jermyn Street. He became a licentiate of the College of Physicians, Sep tember 30, 1756. In 1762 he was consulted by Queen Charlotte, and in 1764 was made physician-extraordinary to her Majesty. On the departure of his brother John for the army, Hunter engaged as an assistant Mr William Hewson, whom he subsequently admitted to partnership in his lectures. Hewson was succeeded in 1770 by Mr Cruikshank. Hunter became in 1767 a fellow of the Royal Society ; in 1768 a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and third professor of anatomy to the Royal Academy of Arts ; and in 1780 and 1782 respectively an associate of the Royal Medical Society and of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris. During the closing ten years of his life his health failed greatly. His last lecture, at the conclusion of which he fainted, was given, contrary to the remonstrances of friends, only a few days before his death, which took place March 30, 1783. He was buried in the rector s vault at St James s, Piccadilly. Hunter had in 1765 requested of the Hon. Mr Gren- ville the grant of a plot of ground on which he might establish &quot; a museum in London for the improvement of anatomy, surgery, and physic &quot; (see &quot; Papers &quot; at end of his Two Introductory Lectures, 1784), and had offered to expend on its erection 7000, and to endow in perpetuity a pro fessorship of anatomy in connexion with it. His appli cation receiving no recognition, he after many months abandoned his scheme, and built himself a house, with lecture and dissecting-rooms, in Great Windmill Street, whither he removed in 1770. In one fine apartment in this house was accommodated his collection, comprising anatomical and pathological preparations, ancient coins and medals, minerals, shells, and corals. His natural history specimens were in part. a purchase, for 1200, of the executors of his friend Dr John Fothergill (see vol. ix. p. 475). Hunter s whole collection, together with his fine library of Greek and Latin classics, and an endowment of 8000, by his will became, after the lapse of twenty years, the property of the university of Glasgow. His paternal estate of Long Calderwood was left to his brother- in-law, Dr James Baillie, by whom, as soon as the will was proved, it was made over to John Hunter. Hunter was never married, and was a man of frugal habits. Like his brother John, he was an early riser, and a man of untir ing industry. He is described as being in his lectures, which were of two hours duration, &quot; both simple and pro found, minute in demonstration, and yet the reverse of dry and tedious;&quot; and his mode of introducing anecdotal illustrations of his topic was most happy. Lecturing was to him a pleasure, and, notwithstanding his many profes sional distractions, he regularly continued it, because, as he said, he &quot; conceived that a man may do infinitely more good to the public by teaching his art than by practising it&quot; (see &quot; Memorial &quot; appended to Introd. Lect., p. 120). Hunter was the author of several contributions to the Medical Observations and Enquiries and the Philosophical Transactions. In his paper on the structure of cartilages and joints, published in the latter in 1743, he anticipated what Bichat sixty years afterwards wrote concerning the structure and arrangement of the synovial membranes. His Medical Commentaries (pt. i., 1762, supplemented 1764) contains, among other like matter, details of his disputes with the Munros as to who first had successfully performed the injection of the tubuli tcstis (in which, however, both he and they had been forestalled by Haller in 1745), and as to who had dis covered the true office of the lymphatics (cf. ANATOMY, vol. i. p. 815), and also a discussion on the question whether he or Pott ought to be considered the earliest to have elucidated the nature of hernia congenita, which, as a matter of fact, had been previously explained by Haller. In the Commentaries is exhibited Hunter s one weakness an inordinate love of controversy. His impatience of contradiction he averred to be a characteristic of anatomists, in whom he once jocularly condoned it, on the plea that &quot;the passive submission of dead bodies&quot; rendered the crossing of their will the less bearable. His great work, The Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus, exhibited in Figures, fol. (see ANATOMY, vol. i. p. 816), was pub lished in 1774. His posthumous works are T-wo Introductory Lectures, 1784, and Anatomical Description of the Human Gravid Uterus, 1794, which was re-edited by Dr Eigby in 1843. See Gent. Mag., liii. pt. 1, p. 364, 1783; S. F. Simmons, An Account of tlie Life of W. Hunter, 1783 ; Adams s and Ottley s Lives of J. Hunter; Sir B. C. Brodie, Hunterian Oration, 18o7; W. Munk, The Roll of the Royal College, of 1 htificians of London, ii. 205, 1878 ; and the preceding article. (! . II. B.) HUNTING. The circumstances which render necessary the habitual pursuit of wild animals, either as a means of subsistence or for self-defence, generally accompany a phase of human progress distinctly inferior to the pastoral and agricultural stages ; resorted to as a recreation, on the other hand, the practice of the chase in most cases indicates a considerable degree of civilization, and sometimes ulti mately becomes the almost distinctive employment of the classes which are possessed of most leisure and wealth. It is only in some of its latter aspects, viz., as a &quot;sport,&quot; pur sued on fixed rules and principles, that hunting requires notice here. The information we possess as to the field sports of the ancients is in many directions extremely fragmentary. With regard to the ancient Egyptians, however, we learn that the huntsmen constituted an entire subdivision of the great second caste ; they either followed the chase on their own account, or acted as the attendants of the chiefs in their hunting excursions, taking charge of the dogs, and securing and bringing home the game. The game was sought in the open deserts which border on both sides the valley of the Nile ; but (by the wealthy) sometimes in enclosed spaces into which the animals had been driven, or in preserves. Besides the noose and the net, the arrow, the dart, and the hunting pole or venabuhim were frequently employed. The animals chiefly hunted were the gazelle, ibex, oryx, stag, wild ox, wild sheep, hare, and porcupine ; also the ostrich for its plumes, and the fox, jackal, wolf, hyaena, and leopard for their skins, or as enemies of the farm-yard. The lion was occasionally trained as a hunt ing animal instead of the dog. The sportsman appears, occasionally at least, in the later periods, to have gone to cover in his chariot or on horseback ; according to Wilkinson, when the dogs threw off in a level plain of great extent, it