Page:The Hunterian Oration 1839.djvu/30

 THE HUNTERIAN ORATION. 23

researches into the animal organization, to form princi- ples, bearing, not simply on the treatment of a single disease, or a class of diseases, but upon the whole series of effects of injury and disease, for the relief of which, in the character of physician, or surgeon, our know- ledge and skill are required.

Of the improvements in surgery through the last half century, the first in order of occurrence, the most important to the preservation of human life, has been the successful treatment of aneurism, to be reckoned the fairest of the fruits of Hunter’s genius. It has been a question, who may have been the first to en- circle, by ligature, an artery distant from the seat of an aneurism. But it is certain that the merit of origina- ting those reflections on which the principle of the measure is founded, belongs to Mr. Hunter, that this profound observer of the processes of Nature, in the view of gathering from them a knowledge of the processes of disease, and of the means whereby it might be arrested, did, by this course of investigation, bring his mind to a confidence in the power of the blood vessels of a limb to maintain the circulation after the obliteration of their trunk, and in the power of the absorbent vessels to remove the aneurism after the current of blood has ceased to flow through it.

Almost to the present time were living the two in- dividuals, who were the subjects of the first and the third operations for aneurism in the lower part of the �