of a school that has established in the United States the manner and the traditions of the Beaux Arts. He took a prominent part in the founding of the American Institute of Architects, and, from 1888, was its president. His talent was eminently practical; and he was almost equally successful in the ornate style of the early Renaissance in France, in the picturesque style of his comfortable villas, and the monumental style of the Lenox Library. There is a beautiful memorial to Hunt in the wall of Central Park, opposite this building, erected in 1898 by the associated art and architectural societies of New York, from designs by Daniel C. French and Bruce Price. He died on the 31st of July 1895.
HUNTER, JOHN (1728–1793), British physiologist and surgeon, was born on the 13th[1] of February 1728, at Long Calderwood, in the parish of East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, being the youngest of the ten children of John and Agnes Hunter. His father, who died on the 30th of October 1741,[2] aged 78, was descended from the old Ayrshire family of Hunter of Hunterston, and his mother was the daughter of a Mr Paul, treasurer of Glasgow. Hunter is said to have made little progress at school, being averse to its restraints and pursuits, and fond of country amusements. When seventeen years old he went to Glasgow, where for a short time he assisted his brother-in-law, Mr Buchanan, a cabinetmaker. Being desirous at length of some settled occupation, he obtained from his brother William (q.v.) permission to aid, under Mr Symonds, in making dissections in his anatomical school, then the most celebrated in London, intending, should he be unsuccessful there, to enter the army. He arrived accordingly in the metropolis in September 1748, about a fortnight before the beginning of his brother’s autumnal course of lectures. After succeeding beyond expectation with the dissection of the muscles of an arm, he was entrusted with a similar part injected, and from the excellence of his second essay Dr Hunter predicted that he would become a good anatomist. Seemingly John Hunter had hitherto received no instruction in preparation for the special course of life upon which he had entered.
Hard-working, and singularly patient and skilful in dissection, Hunter had by his second winter in London acquired sufficient anatomical knowledge to be entrusted with the charge of his brother’s practical class. In the summer months of 1749–1750, at Chelsea Military Hospital, he attended the lectures and operations of William Cheselden, on whose retirement in the following year he became a surgeon’s pupil at St Bartholomew’s, where Percivall Pott was one of the senior surgeons. In the summer of 1752 he visited Scotland. Sir Everard Home and, following him, Drewry Ottley state that Hunter began in 1754 to assist his brother as his partner in lecturing; according, however, to the European Magazine for 1782, the office of lecturer was offered to Hunter by his brother in 1758, but declined by him on account of the “insuperable embarrassments and objections” which he felt to speaking in public. In 1754 he became a surgeon’s pupil at St George’s Hospital, where he was appointed house-surgeon in 1756.[3] During the period of his connexion with Dr Hunter’s school he, in addition to other labours, solved the problem of the descent of the testis in the foetus, traced the ramifications of the nasal and olfactory nerves within the nose, experimentally tested the question whether veins could act as absorbents, studied the formation of pus and the nature of the placental circulation, and with his brother earned the chief merit of practically proving the function and importance of the lymphatics in the animal economy. On the 5th of June 1755,[4] he was induced to enter as a gentleman commoner at St Mary’s Hall, Oxford, but his instincts would not permit him, to use his own expression, “to stuff Latin and Greek at the university.” Some three and thirty years later he thus significantly wrote of an opponent: “Jesse Foot accuses me of not understanding the dead languages; but I could teach him that on the dead body which he never knew in any language dead or living.”[5] Doubtless, however, linguistic studies would have served to correct in him what was perhaps a natural defect—a difficulty in the presentation of abstract ideas not wholly attributable to the novelty of his doctrines.
An attack of inflammation of the lungs in the spring of 1759 having produced symptoms threatening consumption, by which the promising medical career of his brother James had been cut short, Hunter obtained in October 1760 the appointment of staff-surgeon in Hodgson and Keppel’s expedition to Belleisle. With this he sailed in 1761. In the following year he served with the English forces on the frontier of Portugal. Whilst with the army he acquired the extensive knowledge of gunshot wounds embodied in his important treatise (1794) on that subject, in which, amongst other matters of moment, he insists on the rejection of the indiscriminate practice of dilating with the knife followed almost universally by surgeons of his time. When not engaged in the active duties of his profession, he occupied himself with physiological and other scientific researches. Thus, in 1761, off Belleisle, the conditions of the coagulation of the blood were among the subjects of his inquiries.[6] Later, on land, he continued the study of human anatomy, and arranged his notes and memoranda on inflammation; he also ascertained by experiment that digestion does not take place in snakes and lizards during hibernation, and observed that enforced vigorous movement at that season proves fatal to such animals, the waste so occasioned not being compensated, whence he drew the inference that, in the diminution of the power of a part attendant on mortification, resort to stimulants which increase action without giving real strength is inadvisable.[7] A MS. catalogue by Hunter, probably written soon after his return from Portugal, shows that he had already made a collection of about two hundred specimens of natural and morbid structures.
On arriving in England early in 1763, Hunter, having retired from the army on half-pay, took a house in Golden Square, and began the career of a London surgeon. Most of the metropolitan practice at the time was held by P. Pott, C. Hawkins, Samuel Sharp, Joseph Warner and Robert Adair; and Hunter sought to eke out his at first slender income by teaching practical anatomy and operative surgery to a private class. His leisure was devoted to the study of comparative anatomy, to procure subjects for which he obtained the refusal of animals dying in the Tower menagerie and in various travelling zoological collections. In connexion with his rupture of a tendo Achillis,[8] in 1767, he performed on dogs several experiments which, with the illustrations in his museum of the reunion of such structures after division, laid the foundation of the modern practice of cutting through tendons (tenotomy) for the relief of distorted and contracted joints. In the same year he was elected F.R.S. His first contribution to the Philosophical Transactions, with the
- ↑ The date is thus entered in the parish register, see Joseph Adams, Memoirs, Appendix, p. 203. The Hunterian Oration, instituted in 1813 by Dr Matthew Baillie and Sir Everard Home, is delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons on the 14th of February, which Hunter used to give as the anniversary of his birth.
- ↑ Ottley’s date, 1738, is inaccurate, see S. F. Simmons, Account of ... W. Hunter, p. 7. Hunter’s mother died on the 3rd of November 1751, aged 66.
- ↑ So in Home’s Life, p. xvi., and Ottley’s, p. 15. Hunter himself (Treatise on the Blood, p. 62) mentions the date 1755.
- ↑ Ottley incorrectly gives 1753 as the date. In the buttery book for 1755 at St Mary’s Hall his admission is thus noted: “Die Junii 5to 1755 Admissus est Johannes Hunter superioris ordinis Commensalis.” Hunter apparently left Oxford after less than two months’ residence, as the last entry in the buttery book with charges for battels against his name is on July 25, 1755. His name was, however, retained on the books of the Hall till December 10, 1756. The record of Hunter’s matriculation runs: “Ter° Trin. 1755.—Junii 5to Aul. S. Mar. Johannes Hunter 24 Johannis de Kilbride in Com. Clidesdale Scotiae Arm. fil.”
- ↑ Ottley, Life of J. Hunter, p. 22.
- ↑ Treatise on the Blood, p. 21.
- ↑ See Adams, Memoirs, pp. 32, 33. Cf. Hunter’s Treatise on the Blood, p. 8, and Works, ed. Palmer, i. 604.—On the employment of Hunter’s term “increased action” with respect to inflammation, see Sir James Paget, Lect. on Surg. Path., 3rd ed., p. 321 sqq.
- ↑ According to Hunter, as quoted in Palmer’s edition of his lectures, p. 437, the accident was “after dancing, and after a violent fit of the cramp”; W. Clift, however, who says he probably never danced, believed that he met with the accident “in getting up from the dissecting table after being cramped by long sitting” (see W. Lawrence, Hunt. Orat., 1834, p. 64).
