The Hunter Corpus

Hunter froze fish, and dormice, and his own fingers, trying to work out whether life could be suspended and restarted. Ottley records what he was actually hoping for.

"This was for some time a favourite inquiry, and he used to speculate on the possibility of freezing human beings, and thawing them to life two or three centuries after, a project which, if he could realize, he expected would make his fortune."

That is cryonics, complete with the business model, in about 1766. Ottley then delivers the sentence that makes the whole thing land.

"Whilst his friends Lynn and Benjamin West, therefore, were warming themselves with a bout of skating on the Serpentine, Hunter staid at home freezing his fingers in pursuit of this his philosopher's stone."

Edward Jenner, then a young protégé, wrote to Hunter with a question about hibernating hedgehogs and a proposed answer. Hunter's reply is the whole Enlightenment compressed into nine words.

"I thank you for your experiment on the hedgehog; but why do you ask me a question by the way of solving it? I think your solution is just; but why think? why not try the experiment?"

He then tells Jenner exactly which experiments to run, in the imperative, without a greeting or a softener. Thirty years later Jenner did try the experiment, on a boy named James Phipps, and vaccination followed.

The letters to Jenner are the best writing in the collection because Hunter is not performing. In one, he spends a full paragraph patiently explaining how to read a thermometer, gets to the end, and then, with no transition at all, this.

"What the devil becomes of your eels in the winter?"

Elsewhere he wants a cuckoo, and its nest, and its eggs, and cannot help hearing himself. "I hear you saying, there is no end of your wants." From Bath, mid convalescence, he manages a full weather report in five words: "We are alive here. The downs look like a beehive."

Hunter was the most celebrated operating surgeon in Britain and thought less of operating than almost anyone writing today. Ottley says he repeated this constantly.

"To perform an operation, is to mutilate a patient we cannot cure; it should therefore be considered as an acknowledgment of the imperfection of our art."

Two hundred and thirty years later we have built an entire reimbursement system on the opposite premise.

Charles Byrne, exhibited in London as the Irish Giant, knew Hunter wanted his skeleton and arranged to be buried at sea in a lead coffin. Hunter had already sent his man Howison to follow him. Ottley records the negotiation with the hired watchmen as a series of numbers, and the numbers are the story.

"He had an interview with one of the party at the ale-house, and began by offering him fifty pounds if he would allow the body to be kidnapped; the man agreed, provided his companions would consent, and went out to consult them. He returned shortly, saying that they must have a hundred pounds. Hunter consented to this, and thought the affair settled; but the men finding him so eager, soon came back with an increased demand, which was also agreed to; when further difficulties were found, and larger and larger demands made, until, it is said, they raised the price to five hundred pounds!"

Hunter borrowed the money and moved the body by hackney coach at night, changing carriages en route. The skeleton went on display and stayed on display for two hundred and forty years. In January 2023 the Hunterian Museum announced that Byrne would not be shown when it reopened, while keeping the remains in the collection for research into acromegaly and gigantism. He has still not been buried at sea.

WAiR covered the economics of this trade in The Price of a Body. This is the same episode in the original 1841 telling.

Hunter was testing whether living tissue could be grafted between bodies. The specimens he describes in his lectures are exactly what they sound like.

"Here is another preparation, in which the spur of a cock has been inserted into the comb of another; and here a human tooth, inserted into the same part, and united by means of vessels, which you see injected, from one to the other."

He also moved testicles. "I have also frequently taken out the testis of a cock and replaced it in his belly, where it has adhered and has been nourished; nay, I have put the testis of a cock into the belly of a hen with the same effect." This is transplantation biology being invented by a man with poultry and no theory of immunity.

The commercial application was uglier. Hunter's success with the cock's comb convinced him teeth could be transplanted between people, so healthy front teeth were bought from the poor and set into the sockets of the rich. The practice spread on his authority. What makes the passage remarkable is the footnote he attached to his own claim, in his own voice.

"I may here just remark, that this experiment is not generally attended with success. I succeeded but once out of a great number of trials."

Once. His editor Thomas Bell, fifty years later, adds the bracket that closes the file: an operation "now, I believe, wholly discontinued."

Every medical student hears that John Hunter inoculated his own penis with pus from a gonorrhea patient, accidentally gave himself syphilis, and thereby set venereology back fifty years by concluding the two diseases were one. It is one of the great self experimentation stories. It is also, most likely, not true, and this edition contains the moment it was manufactured.

Here is Hunter's own account, in the treatise, Part VI. Read the grammar.

"To ascertain several facts relative to the venereal disease, the following experiments were made. They were begun in May 1767. Two punctures were made on the penis with a lancet dipped in venereal matter from a gonorrhoea; one puncture was on the glans, the other on the prepuce."

Punctures were made. Not "I made." Hunter is vividly first person about his own gout, his own angina, his own dissections. Here, on the one experiment that would define him, he goes passive and stays passive for pages.

Now here is the editorial footnote, a few hundred pages earlier in the same volume, attached to a passage about whether gonorrhea and chancre share a poison.

"The author inoculated himself with the matter of gonorrhoea, and the consequence was the production of chancres, followed by bubo, and by secondary symptoms. The experiment is related, at length, in Part VI."

That sentence is not Hunter's. It is his editor's, and it first appeared in G. G. Babington's 1835 edition, forty two years after Hunter died. Nobody knows what Babington based it on. The surgeon George Qvist later argued the claim collapses under scrutiny: Hunter's autopsy showed coronary disease and no syphilitic changes, Hunter never once described himself as the subject, and human experimentation on other people was routine for him. The legend hardened anyway, helped along by a hostile Hunterian Oration in 1925.

So the artifact you can read above is the seam. On one page, a careful man declining to say who he cut. On another, an editor telling you anyway. Everything downstream, including the textbooks, cites the editor.

Standard practice was to cut a gunshot wound open wider, on the theory that the injury needed to be laid bare. Hunter, who had gone out to Belleisle as an army surgeon, thought this was reasoning backwards from a bad premise.

"If there is no peculiarity in a gunshot wound, I think this of dilating them, as a general practice, should be rejected at once; even if it were only for this reason, that few gunshot wounds are alike, and therefore the same practice cannot apply to all."

The argument is not that dilation never helps. It is that a uniform practice cannot fit a non-uniform injury, so the burden falls on the surgeon to justify each case. That is a recognizably modern claim about the limits of protocol, made by a man whose contemporaries were still bleeding people for inflammation.

In 1781 Hunter testified at the trial of Captain John Donnellan, accused of poisoning his brother-in-law Sir Theodosius Boughton with laurel water. Counsel wanted a clean opinion. The transcript is a masterclass in refusing to give one.

"Every man is just as good a judge as I am" is the line, and it is the correct answer. Hunter is drawing the boundary between what the autopsy showed and what the story wanted. Donnellan was convicted and hanged. Hunter was widely criticized for having been unhelpful.

Hunter had angina and had worked out, correctly and decades before anyone could do anything about it, that emotion drove the attacks. He had a famously terrible temper. He said so himself.

"His life was in the hands of any rascal who chose to annoy and teaze him."

On the morning of 16 October 1793 he was due at a St. George's Hospital board meeting to argue for admitting two Scottish students who had arrived in London unaware of a new rule designed to keep them out. He knew what arguing would cost him. Ottley records that he told a friend who called on him that morning that he feared a dispute, and stated "his conviction that if it did it would certainly prove fatal to him."

He went anyway. A colleague contradicted him flatly. Hunter stopped speaking, left the table, and got as far as the next room.

"Struggling to suppress the tumult of his passion, hurried into the adjoining room, which he had scarcely reached when, with a deep groan, he fell lifeless into the arms of Dr. Robertson."

He had diagnosed himself accurately, predicted the mechanism, named the day, and went to the meeting regardless, on behalf of two students he had never met. That is not a man killed by a committee. That is a man who priced the risk correctly and decided the boys were worth it.

Hunter kept animals at his Earl's Court house. Among them, two leopards, chained in an outhouse. One day they broke out into the yard and got in among his dogs.

"He found one of the leopards engaged with the dogs, whilst the other was making his escape over the wall, and instantly, though quite unarmed, he ran up and laid hold..."

He got both back into the outhouse and then, Ottley notes, was overcome and nearly fainted once he realized what he had done. A bull had already knocked him down in the same yard on a previous occasion, and a servant had to drive it off. The man who told Jenner to stop thinking and try the experiment applied the same policy to large cats.

The most underrated thing in these volumes is the apparatus. Palmer, Bell, and Richard Owen annotate Hunter constantly, and their brackets are where you can watch nineteenth century medicine deciding what to keep. Palmer's assessment of Hunter's prose is unusually direct for a man editing his own idol.

"It does, in many parts, exhibit imperfections of style and diction, as well as repetitions, which not unfrequently obscure the author's meaning; and illogical errors, such as that of confounding proximate and final causes, or employing such imaginary causes as the 'stimulus of necessity,' 'the stimulus of death,' 'the force of a negative impression,' to account for certain effects; phrases which cheat the ear with a seeming explanation, but leave the mind..."

Phrases which cheat the ear with a seeming explanation. If you have sat through a vendor demo in the last two years, you have a use for that.