The Reluctant Surgeon: A Biography of John Hunter

by John Kobler

John Hunter was a pioneering Scottish surgeon whose 18th-century experiments and practices were ahead of his time in many ways. Hunterian literature crowds the shelves of medical libraries the world over. The Britannica devotes more space to Hunter than to Linneaus, Pare, Harvey, Jenner, Lister, Simpson, Pasteur, Freud, or Fleming. Yet outside the scientific community the name today strikes only a dim spark of recognition, if any at all. Although his practical contributions were legion, none had the kind of dramatic impact, the easily grasped significance, that excites the lay imagination. What Hunter accomplished transcended specific discovery and technical invention. He introduced a new spirit of inquiry, a philosophy, which not only transformed the medical theory and practice of his epoch, but profoundly influenced scientific thinking everywhere down to our own times.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

359 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

Reviews

[Dorcas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating book, recommended for all lovers of medical fiction and non fiction. This man was truly amazing! Well worth a read.

[Randy · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s fair to be suspicious of books with long titles such as The Reluctant Surgeon: A Biography of John Hunter, Medical Genius and Great Inquirer of Johnson’s England. The author, John Kobler, was a magazine editor and this book was published in 1960. A long title leads on to the suspicion that the author, editors and publisher weren’t sure what to call the book. As a result, they called it a whole lot of things. Trouble is the title doesn’t very accurately describe the material. For example, it’s not all about John Hunter. The first half, in fact, is about his brother—William Hunter, another renown London medico. Kobler does end up recounting the strange life of John Hunter but along the way provides much information about 18th Century medical and surgical practice and practitioners.

As a biography The Reluctant Surgeon doesn’t have much of an arc. We start with John Hunter, we leave him, we come back to him, diverting this way and that through a curiosity shop of characters, quacks, charlatans, and geniuses. We keep reading because the content, if not cohesive, is just plain interesting.

Consider the case of Mary Toft who in November of 1726 began to give birth to rabbits. The King’s surgeon himself delivered the sixteenth rabbit and attested to the genuineness of the birth phenomenon. Mary was finally exposed as a hoaxer by a man-midwife named Sir Richard Manningham who thought the placenta resembled a hog’s bladder. When finally confronted by Sir Richard and Dr. Douglas, renowned for the discovery of the Douglas Pouch (a peritoneal fold within the pelvis) Mary confessed that upon having a miscarriage, and on the advice of a woman accomplice who told her she could become famous, she began to stuff rabbits into her uterus until her body rebelled and began to reject them one at a time as if in a birth convulsion.

Dr. Douglas found his famous pouch while dissecting a human body. He, and John and William Hunter were, first and foremost, anatomists. They were students of human anatomy. From their dissections they learned early surgical techniques, though John Hunter preferred to rely on what he described as natural methods of healing and performed surgery only as a last resort. Thus, the author’s choice of the adjective “reluctant” in his title. However, the book could have easily been called John Hunter the Avid Anatomist because he was a fiend for studying the carcass of any species and amassed one of the greatest natural history collections of his time. The author reports the legend that Robert Louis Stevenson had Hunter’s laboratory in mind when he described Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory. In fact, his profligate spending for specimens of all description from around the globe bankrupted him and it was only after his museum of nearly 17,000 specimens were sold to the Crown for twenty cents on the dollar that his widow could again begin to live in some resemblance of comfort.

The study of the natural world was the rage. Collecting was the hobby of many aristocrats and great men of the age such as Sir Joseph Banks who had accompanied Captain Cook to the South Seas. Readers of Patrick O’Brian will find in characters like John Hunter a model of sorts for Stephen Maturin, Jack Aubrey’s ship’s surgeon who was, first and foremost, an enthusiastic student of the natural world.

Medical schools of the day were a collection of lectures and dissections and hospital apprenticeships. Cadavers were in such great demand that body snatching became a national disgrace until legislation made corpses readily and plentifully available. Before that happened John Hunter could have been called The Ardent Body Snatcher for his facility in dealing with London’s underworld. When the Irish giant, Patrick Cotter O’Brien was near death the corpse-watchers gathered. O’Brien, fearing what might happen to his 8’ 4” shell prearranged a lead casket and hired a group of men to take his body out to sea. But John Hunter negotiated a five hundred pounds fee to O’Brien’s body watchers and they delivered the giant to his chamber where Hunter boiled the parts down in a large copper coffin and added the skeleton to his already large collection.

Studying venereal disease, Hunter infected himself. The “great inquirer” punctured his foreskin and then the head of his penis and polluted himself with pus. What he thought was gonorrhea turned out to be a combination of syphilis and gonorrhea. He carefully noted the symptoms and let them develop before treating them with the standard mercury elixir. This scientific experiment had long-lasting health implications for his entire family.

Hunter is considered one of the greatest and most imaginative surgeons of all times. An operation for aneurysm is performed today much as he conceived it in the seventeen hundreds. He is also remembered for his writing. In his Treatise on the Venereal Disease he was the first to identify the Hunterian chancre or hard chancre—the initial lesion of syphilis. A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-shot Wounds marked his observations as an army surgeon during the Seven Years War. He was also author of a two volume Natural History of Teeth in which he speculated on a biological interdependence of the teeth and body as a whole which the author cites as “perhaps the most important single principle of dentistry.” Unfortunately, a principle most modern day dentists and doctors have forgotten or ignore. He noted that teeth can become a “focus of infection” and produce diseases in other organs.

Hunter died in 1793, in debt and in controversy. Sixty-six years later his body was moved to Westminster Abbey where he was honored by the Royal College of Surgeons for his services to mankind as the the founder of scientific surgery.

[Margaret]

JBM recommendation