FOOTNOTES:
[21] Fortnightly Review, June 1885, p. 775.
[22] World, September 18, 1878.
[CHAPTER XXVI.]
EMINENT SPECIALISTS—continued.
SIR W. BOWMAN, BRUDENELL CARTER, AND EYE DISEASES; TOYNBEE, HINTON, AND EAR DISEASES.
The eye, the organ of light, was, till recent times, practically a dark chamber. Only its grosser movements and the effects of its lenses upon the rays of light were understood. Its minute structure, its relationship to the brain, and the real nature of the morbid changes occurring in it, were hidden. To-day its microscopic elements are unravelled, and very much is known of their connexion with the great nerve-centres behind them. Experiment and calculation have gone far to settle the precise mode in which light gives rise to sight, and affects our perception and judgment of external objects, and the condition of the eye during life and health or disease has been brought into view by the ophthalmoscope. The names of Helmholtz and of Donders are inseparably connected with modern advances in the physiology of the eye, while no English name is more conspicuous in regard to the surgery of the eye than that with which we commence this chapter.
William Bowman, the third son of Mr. J. Eddowes Bowman, banker, of Nantwich, and afterwards of Welshpool and Wrexham, was born at Nantwich on July 20, 1816. He was early surrounded by scientific associations, for his father was a botanist and geologist of wide cultivation, having formed a very complete herbarium of British plants, and having furnished to Sir Roderick Murchison valuable original matter for his “Silurian System.”
Mr. Bowman placed his son at Hazelwood School, Birmingham, which Sir Rowland Hill’s father was conducting on the principle of the abolition of corporal punishment. The boys largely governed themselves, printing a magazine of their own. They were taught natural science too, a very unusual thing in those days. In such a congenial atmosphere young Bowman flourished, and in time became head boy.
An accident to one of his hands, about the close of his school course, seems to have led to Mr. Bowman’s choice of surgery as a profession. For some months he saw country practice with Mr. T. T. Griffith, of Wrexham, seeing a good deal of cholera, which was then prevailing, and spending his leisure in copying anatomical drawings of the human bones and muscles. He then became, through the interest of Mr. Joseph Hodgson, F.R.S., afterwards President of the College of Surgeons, who had attended to his injured hand, a resident pupil at the General Hospital, Birmingham, where he continued for five years.
These early years were fruitful in microscopical observations of both healthy and diseased tissues, and even in experimental physiology, for Mr. Bowman was one of those whose advancement in science has been considerably due to experiments upon animals. In 1837, after a brief visit to the Dublin medical schools, he became a student at King’s College, London, where Robert Bentley Todd had been lately appointed Professor of Physiology. Mr. Bowman’s skill and extensive knowledge were soon made use of by Todd, and he was successively appointed prosector and demonstrator of anatomy and curator of the anatomical museum.
In 1838 Mr. Bowman visited the hospitals and museums of Holland, Germany, and Vienna, and made a considerable stay in Paris in 1841. Meanwhile his original studies were bearing fruit in important papers contributed to the Royal Society, “On the Minute Structure and Movements of Voluntary Muscle” (1840), “On the Contraction of Voluntary Muscle in the Living Body” (1841), and, “On the Structure and Use of the Malpighian Bodies of the Kidney” (1842). The latter marked a conspicuous advance in the physiology of the kidney, and Mr. Bowman was distinguished by receiving a royal medal for it, having been elected F.R.S. in the previous year. Professor Michael Foster, in his address on Physiology to the International Medical Congress of 1881, referred to these memoirs on muscle and the kidney as “classic works, known and read of all instructed physiologists.”
In 1840 Mr. Bowman, at the early age of twenty-four, was appointed Assistant-Surgeon to King’s College Hospital. His scientific writing became much in demand. He wrote on Surgery in the “Encyclopædia Metropolitana,” on Muscle, Motion, and Mucous Membrane in Todd’s “Cyclopædia of Anatomy and Physiology,” and took a large share with Dr. Todd in writing and illustrating the “Physiological Anatomy and Physiology of Man,” which was brought out in parts. The desire to render this book as far as possible accurate and original by repeating most of the observations of others and making new ones where necessary, led to successive delays in the appearance of the parts. Finally the closing part was written by Dr. Lionel Beale, and published in 1856.
Having become a Fellow of the College of Surgeons in 1844, Mr. Bowman in 1846 joined the staff of the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital, Moorfields, as assistant-surgeon, having already made extensive researches into the minute structure of all the organs of special sense. His advent to the Moorfields Hospital was marked by the delivery, in 1847, of a series of lectures on the “Parts Concerned in Operations on the Eye,” which were afterwards separately published. It was evident that ophthalmic surgery had gained a distinguished recruit. Mr. Bowman had, independently of Brücke, discovered the ciliary muscle, and his work brought forward numerous other facts of structure for the first time. His paper “On the Structure of the Vitreous Body,” contributed to the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science, also attracted good attention. His suggestions on operations for artificial pupil in the Medical Times and Gazette also showed conspicuous capacity for ophthalmic surgery.
Although much urged to devote himself exclusively to this branch of practice, Mr. Bowman preferred to continue in general surgical practice for many years, attaining the surgeoncy to King’s College Hospital in 1856, two years after he had reached the full surgeoncy at Moorfields. In 1848 he had been conjoined with Dr. Todd in the professorship of physiology and general and morbid anatomy in King’s College, retaining the professorship, after Dr. Todd’s retirement, in conjunction with Dr. Beale. But by 1855 Mr. Bowman found himself so fully occupied that he finally resigned the professorship. He held the surgeoncy to King’s College Hospital till 1862.
From this period Mr. Bowman has been the acknowledged leader of ophthalmic practice. He was one of the first to employ the ophthalmoscope. His numerous papers in the Ophthalmic Hospital Reports and in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions have given particulars of many improvements in operations on the eye, which he has adopted, introduced, or improved. Lachrymal obstructions, glaucoma, conical cornea, and cataract are among the subjects he has specially dealt with; and he has by his clinical teaching and operative example contributed not a little to the building up of modern ophthalmic surgery. The well-earned honour of a baronetcy was conferred upon him in 1884.
The breadth of Sir William Bowman’s sympathies is shown on the one hand by the active part he took in the establishment in 1848 of the St. John’s House Sisterhood for training nurses for hospitals, families, and the poor, having joined its council from the beginning, and having materially assisted Miss Florence Nightingale in her various philanthropic nursing enterprises; and, on the other hand, by his consistent advocacy of physiological experiment. He considers that every step forwards in our knowledge of the healthy body must lead to a better understanding of disease and an improvement of our power of counteracting it, whether in the way of prevention, alleviation, or cure.
In his address to the British Medical Association at Chester in 1866,[23] this eminent authority took occasion to protest forcibly against the imputation of cruelty to animals sometimes made against medical men in respect of physiological experiments. He insisted both on the excessive difficulty of these original inquiries and the high motives which actuate physiologists and the higher class of scientific inquirers. “There should be no doubt,” said he, “as to the free allowance of dissections of living creatures for the advancement, and also for the communication, of a knowledge so indispensable for our race, and for every generation of it.” He practically charged the opponents of vivisection with stopping the gates of knowledge, neither going in themselves nor suffering those that were entering to go in.
The lofty view which Sir William Bowman takes of the surgeon’s function may be gathered from an extract from the above-mentioned address. “I see no reason to doubt that future ages will still accept the pious saying of one of old, that surgery is the Hands of God; the Human Hands, apt images and reflex of man’s whole being, from his morning hour of puling helplessness, when the
“... tender palm is prest
Against the circle of the breast;”
through all his working day of time, until they shall be upraised once more at last in joy and adoration, to hail a brighter and an eternal dawning; the Human Hands, permitted now, through insight into God’s laws, to be His instruments of succour to that earthly life and organisation which His power, wisdom, and love have first brought into being, still alone both sustain and cause to perish when their part is played; to that material organisation which dies every hour it lives, which indeed dies by living, and lives by dying, and which wondrously transmits ever its own prerogatives and dark secrets to a succeeding life, destined apparently to remain a marvel and a mystery impenetrable to all generations.”
The career of Mr. R. Brudenell Carter is of special interest, owing to the fact that he was a general practitioner in the country till the age of forty, and came to London in 1868 without friends or connection, intending to establish himself as a specialist in eye diseases, and in a few years attained to eminence. But Mr. Carter’s life had been previously marked by energy and success of no common order; and his literary tastes and accomplishments ranked in the forefront of the causes of his success.
A reference to Mr. Carter’s ancestry will show that good hereditary influences met and combined in him. His father was a major in the royal marines; his grandfather, rector of Little Wittenham in Berkshire, was a younger brother of Elizabeth Carter, the well-known poetess and translator of Epictetus, whose portrait by Lawrence is in the National Portrait Gallery. The rector was entirely educated by his learned sister till he went to Cambridge. The rector’s wife was a granddaughter of John Wallis, the mathematician and astronomer, one of the founders of the Royal Society. The Carters belonged to the younger branch of a family which had held the manor of St. Columb Major in Cornwall from the time of Henry VII.
Mr. Carter was born, at Little Wittenham on October 2, 1828. After being at private schools he commenced his professional education by apprenticeship to a general practitioner, and afterwards entered at the London Hospital. After becoming a member of the College of Surgeons in 1851 he practised for a short time at Leytonstone and at Putney.
At this period Mr. Carter published his first work “On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria” (1853). This was avowedly based to a considerable extent upon the opinions and practice of Mr. Stephen Mackenzie, then recently deceased, who was extensively known by his successful treatment of the most inveterate hysterical disorders. This work in itself sufficiently indicated the presence of a writer possessing both clearness of view and moderation of statement.
This was followed by a much more extensive treatise “On the Influence of Education and Training in Preventing Diseases of the Nervous System” (1855). Mr. Carter was led to write it by observing the frequent connection between faulty education and nervous or mental disorders. It is divided into three parts, dealing respectively with the Nervous System, Physical Education, and Moral Education. The latter was that for the sake of which the book was written; it displays a thoughtful moderation and breadth of view, without, however, forecasting the author’s future eminence.
Immediately upon the completion of this book Mr. Carter started for the Crimea, where he served with the army as staff-surgeon. Returning home when peace was concluded, he settled in Nottinghamshire, and soon moving into the town of Nottingham, took an active part in the establishment of an eye hospital there. In 1862 he removed to Stroud in Gloucestershire, and founded an eye hospital in Gloucester. In 1864 Mr. Carter became Fellow of the College of Surgeons by examination.
In 1868 Mr. Carter took the important step of removing to London, resolving to rely upon medical and other literary work mainly until practice should come. Thus Mr. Carter has been the writer of very voluminous contributions to journalism, and has shown great ease and lucidity of style. In 1869 he was appointed Surgeon to the Royal South London Ophthalmic Hospital, and in 1870 Ophthalmic Surgeon to St. George’s Hospital. He has persevered in commenting severely upon errors of modern education, and has especially dealt with evils done in various ways to the eyes in modern life. One pamphlet of his, “On the Artificial Production of Stupidity in Schools,” has been often reprinted. In an address at the opening of the Medical Session at St. George’s in 1873 Mr. Carter thus spoke of cramming: “The show pupils, who furnish marvellous answers to a multiplicity of questions, on a multiplicity of subjects, in response to the demands of various preliminary or matriculation examinations, remind me of nothing so much as of the wooden cannon which artillerymen call ‘Quakers,’ which require for their production in unlimited numbers, besides the blocks of wood, nothing but a turning-lathe and a paint-brush; and which are mounted, to deceive the enemy, in embrasures that would otherwise be vacant.... But our ‘competition wallahs,’ instead of being used to deceive an enemy, have been used chiefly to deceive ourselves.”
In 1875 Mr. Carter published an extended and important “Practical Treatise on Diseases of the Eye.” In this he distinctly states that in its normal condition the eye has faults which would condemn a telescope or microscope to be thrown aside as useless, but which in the living organ are neutralised by the conditions under which it is exerted. He recommends any one who would operate upon the eye to take a great deal of preliminary trouble, and to train his hands to especial delicacy of action, so that he shall be indifferent which he uses. “It has more than once been my lot,” he says, “to see attempts to operate upon the human eye made by a surgeon who did not even know how to hold the instruments he was about to misuse; and I can conceive few things more painful than such a spectacle.” “In all ages and countries the bad workman has complained of his tools, and the good workman has produced the most varied results by the most simple means. A man who is very awkward, and whose awkwardness is perpetually bringing him to grief, hits upon a contrivance by which he hopes that this natural result may in some degree be obviated. He calls his contrivance an invention; and, like those persons of whom it is said that their glory is in their shame, he is often somewhat proud of it. Many surgeons of great and deserved repute have invented each a single instrument, such as Beer’s knife or Tyrrell’s hook; and some have invented more than one, chiefly because they have struck out some new procedure for which new appliances were indispensable. But as a rule the invention of many instruments by a surgeon may be accepted as a sufficient proof of his clumsiness; and when, without valid reason, any single operator has his peculiar scissors, and his peculiar hook, and his peculiar forceps, and his peculiar scoop, all called after his name, it is more than probable that the gift of fingers has not been bestowed upon him.”
Mr. Carter in 1877 gave a course of lectures “on Defects of Vision which are Remediable by Optical Appliances,” as Hunterian Professor of Pathology and Surgery at the College of Surgeons. These were published in the same year. He has since issued a more popular work, “Eyesight—Good and Bad: a Treatise on the Exercise and Preservation of Vision,” 1880. The following extract has to do with a very injurious form of prejudice due to ignorance.
“The persons who suffer most from popular prejudice and ignorance on the subject of spectacles are men of the superior artisan class, who are engaged on work which requires good eyesight, and who, at the age of fifty or sixty, find their power of accomplishing such work is diminishing. It is a rule in many workshops that spectacles are altogether prohibited, the masters ignorantly supposing them to be evidences of bad sight; whereas the truth is that they are not evidences of bad sight at all, but only of the occurrence of a natural and inevitable change, the effects of which they entirely obviate, leaving the sight as good for all purposes as it ever was.” His general interest in education and its effects is abundantly manifested as in the description of the late Mr. C. Paget’s half-time experiment at Ruddington near Nottingham, where garden work was substituted for about half the ordinary school hours of a portion of the scholars. The children so treated were found after a short period altogether to outstrip in their schoolwork those who devoted, or were supposed to devote, twice as much time to it.
Mr. Carter has translated two valuable works bearing on his specialty: viz., Zander on the Ophthalmoscope, and Scheffler on Ocular Defects. He has contributed to “Our Homes, and How to Make them Healthy,” to the Sydenham Society’s Biennial Retrospect of Medicine, and to many other publications.
Aural surgery has not long been raised to the rank of an honoured specialty. Joseph Toynbee was told on one occasion by an eminent member of the profession that he would make nothing of aural surgery. He replied, “I will work at it for ten years, and then if nothing can be made of it, I will tell you why.” On another occasion he said, “I’ll rescue aural surgery from the hands of the quacks” (Medical Times, July 14, 1866). Prematurely cut off though he was, he added largely to the scientific knowledge of the ear and its maladies, and vastly improved their treatment.
Joseph Toynbee was born in 1815, at Heckington, in Lincolnshire, his father having been a large farmer. After being for some years under a private tutor at home, he went to King’s Lynn Grammar School. At seventeen he was apprenticed to Mr. William Wade of the Westminster General Dispensary, Soho, and studied anatomy under Mr. Dermott. His assiduous and careful dissections were of essential benefit in preparing him for his lifelong minute dissections of the ear in health and disease. He further studied at St. George’s and at University College hospitals. Even during his student life aural studies powerfully attracted him, and as early as 1836 several letters of his under the initials J. T. appeared in the Lancet. In 1838 he became a member of the College of Surgeons, and was selected as assistant-curator of its museum under Professor Owen. He obtained the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1842 for researches demonstrating the non-vascularity of articular cartilage, the cornea, crystalline lens, vitreous humour, and epidermoid appendages, which were published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1841.
Toynbee early entered upon aural practice in Argyll Place, becoming also one of the surgeons to the St. James’s and St. George’s Dispensary. He was included in the first list of Fellows of the College of Surgeons on the issue of its new charter. At the Dispensary he founded a Samaritan Fund for supplying the sick poor with necessaries of life and warmth. All sanitary matters were subjects of his profound interest, and he spent much time in improving the condition of things in the parishes around him, especially promoting means of securing adequate ventilation, and the erection of model lodging-houses near Broad Street, Golden Square.
Toynbee’s practice gradually became very large, but he continued to dissect, and also to support administratively as well as pecuniarily many benevolent societies. He found that so little was really known of the diseases of the ear from actual dissection, that his only hope of framing a system of aural surgery was by personal and persevering examination and record of morbid specimens. This was carried on for more than twenty years, until he had dissected about 2000 human ears. Many of these were derived from his patients in the large Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, whose condition he had examined previously to their death. Many medical men also supplied him with specimens of diseased ears, as well as notes of cases. He further inquired closely into the history of very many cases of patients with diseased ears.
In 1860 Toynbee published an extended work on “The Diseases of the Ear,” which placed the subject on a firm basis, and will always remain of great value from the interesting details of cases and treatment which it contains. The list of his own published papers on which it is based, about sixty in number, testifies to Toynbee’s great industry in research. They include papers on the structure and functions of the tympanic membrane, on the muscles which open the Eustachian tube, and on the mode of conduction of sound from the tympanic membrane to the labyrinth of the ear, contributed to the Royal Society, many researches on the diseases of the ear in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions, and a crowd of series of cases or special memoirs contributed to the Pathological Society and medical journals. In 1857 he had published a descriptive catalogue of the preparations illustrating diseases of the ear contained in his own museum.
On the establishment of St. Mary’s Hospital, Mr. Toynbee was elected aural surgeon and lecturer on diseases of the ear; and he published in 1855 and 1856 courses of clinical lectures, which he delivered there. He took a deep interest in the condition of idiots, and of the deaf and dumb, and in many cases, to his great delight, devised plans by which those who were not totally deaf were taught to speak when their case had been regarded as hopeless, causing a corresponding improvement in their mental faculties.
Two of his most zealously pursued hobbies were ventilation, and the formation of local museums. It was said that patients who went to him for the benefit of their hearing, whether they improved in that respect or not, came away full of the most advanced views on ventilation. At Wimbledon, where he took a country-house, he was indefatigable in developing a village club, and in forming an educative and recreative museum. He published valuable “Hints on the Formation of Local Museums” (1863), as well as “Wimbledon Museum Notes.” His enthusiastic advocacy was actively engaged in furthering the establishment of similar clubs and museums in various parts of the kingdom. He continued through life an active microscopist and zoologist, and was elected just before his death President of the Quekett (Microscopical) Club. At the same time he was treasurer of the Medical Benevolent Club, to which he himself largely contributed.
One of Toynbee’s most valuable contributions to the treatment of deafness was his invention of a method of forming an artificial tympanic membrane when that part had been destroyed or perforated. This is fully described in his pamphlet on the subject, which went through many editions, as well as in his general treatise. He first demonstrated the existence of many osseous and other tumours of the parts of the ear and of the ossicles of the tympanum, and also the fact that the Eustachian tube leading from the back of the throat into the tympanum remains always closed except during the momentary act of swallowing.
A premature end came to Toynbee’s energetic and benevolent life. Always active in experimental research, and much concerned in aural therapeutics, he experimented on himself with chloroform, and it is believed, prussic acid vapour, which he wished to cause to enter by the Eustachian tube into the tympanum for the relief of tinnitus aurium or noises in the ears. He unfortunately pursued his experiments while alone, and was found dead on July 7, 1866, in his consulting room at Savile Row, with a pad of cotton wool over his face, and chloroform and prussic acid bottles, his open watch, and various memoranda of experiments near him. His death excited universal sympathy for Mr. Toynbee’s widow and nine children, with whom he had lived most happily.
If one great aural surgeon became a martyr of science, another was no less a martyr of philanthropy. The name of James Hinton, which gained wide celebrity during his lifetime, has been progressively elevated since his death by the publication of his “Life and Letters,” by Miss Ellice Hopkins, and of his works on “The Art of Thinking,” 1879, “Philosophy and Religion,” 1881, and “The Law-Breaker, and the Coming of the Law,” 1884. Even yet, fortunately, much more may be hoped for, in the shape more especially of an autobiography, and of a work on Ethics.
It has become increasingly evident that James Hinton was, if not a true genius, a man who approached very nearly to that altitude of nature. As Mr. Shadworth Hodgson remarks in the introduction to the “Chapters on the Art of Thinking,” Hinton is a hander-on of Coleridge’s torch, with less of systematic theology and more of emotional spiritualism. It is quite impossible to attempt here to sketch his various philosophical contributions. Indeed the time has not yet fully come to estimate them, their influence, or the man who gave birth to them. As an aural surgeon he perhaps scarcely rose to Toynbee’s level, but this was rather because the greatness of his mind and soul in vaster fields overpowered him, than from defect of ability. An outline of his life and work only can here be given.
James Hinton was the third child (of eleven) of the well-known Baptist minister, John Howard Hinton, having been born at Reading in 1822. His father’s mother was aunt to Isaac Taylor, the author of the “Natural History of Enthusiasm.” It was from his mother, Eliza Birt, however, that James Hinton derived most. She is described as a fervent, lofty-souled woman, full of enthusiasm and compassion, yet dignified and able to rule others with mild but irresistible sway.
As a little child, James Hinton, though sweet-tempered, showed a strong tendency to investigate everything, and to rearrange the elder children’s games “as they ought to be.” The father taught the children to be keenly observant of natural history. The mother bred them up to have an instinctive feeling for religion, especially in its aspect of love to God. An elder brother, Howard, died when James was but twelve, and this bereavement made such an impression upon him that he soon after was baptized and publicly received as a member of the Baptist Church.
At school James Hinton did not show special ability, though he had a remarkable verbal memory until a certain period, when he suddenly lost it without any special cause. In 1838 his father left Reading for London, becoming minister of the Devonshire Square Chapel. Feeling some pressure of circumstances with his large family, Mr. Hinton placed James in the first situation which presented itself, viz., that of cashier at a wholesale woollen-draper’s shop in Whitechapel. This temporary immersion in proximity to some of the coarsest scenes imaginable had a very deep influence in educing the thoroughgoing altruism which afterwards characterised him.
After holding the Whitechapel situation about a year, and spending some time in search of a more suitable occupation, Hinton became a clerk in an insurance office in the city. Here, while not becoming an adept at book-keeping, he sat up at night and gave himself a miscellaneous education. At this time he has been described as “an abstract idea untidily expressed;” he was wholly indifferent to appearances, and his clothes could never be made to fit him; and he was often guilty of lapses from politeness. He was full of argumentativeness, and determined to get to the bottom of everything.
A little later his intense intellectual labours, combined with the deep sense he now and ever after entertained of the wrongs to which women were subjected, brought him into a state of mind in which he resolved to run away to sea. His intention being discovered, his father consulted a doctor about him, who wisely advised that he should enter the medical profession, as being more fitted to give scope for his mental powers. He was consequently entered at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital at the age of twenty. He was able to perform his entire course of medical study with very great rapidity, and before taking his diploma went on a voyage to China and back as surgeon of a passenger ship. On his return in 1847 be became a member of the College of Surgeons, and settled for a time as a surgeon’s assistant at Newport in Essex.
He did not remain here long, but in the autumn of 1847 took the position of surgeon to a shipload of freed slaves who were to be shipped by voluntary agreement from Sierra Leone to Jamaica. He remained for more than a year after this in Jamaica, taking the practice of a medical man in ill-health, and looking after the progress of his late charges. In 1849-50 he travelled homewards by way of New Orleans, where he gained further insight into the slavery question. In 1850 he entered into partnership with a Mr. Fisher, a surgeon in general practice in Bartholomew Close; and became engaged to Miss Margaret Haddon, after an attachment of ten years.
In August 1850 we find the first note of his success in aural surgery; he cured his mother’s deafness by a syringing properly performed. Some other cases of success followed this, and were very cheering. Soon after this he was introduced to Mr. Toynbee, and spent much time with him both at St. Mary’s Hospital and privately. Yet he did not find anything in practice large enough to satisfy his aspirations. “Too many things crowd upon me; none commands me,” he writes March 1851. “The thing which shall fill my heart must be not for myself but for others. To be contented I must toil not for comfort, nor money, nor for fame, nor for love, but for truth and righteousness.”
In 1852 Hinton’s marriage with Miss Haddon took place, one of singularly deep affection. He was now in practice for himself, finding general practice not very profitable, especially as he would not condescend to use arts to obtain success. He continued his study of aural surgery, and assisted Mr. Toynbee largely in the classification of his museum, already alluded to.
In 1856 Hinton published his earliest papers on physiology and ethics in the Christian Spectator. In 1858 he contributed an essay to the Medico-Chirurgical Review on “Physical Morphology,” suggesting that organic growth takes place in the direction of least resistance—a conception utilised by Mr. Herbert Spencer in his “First Principles.” In 1859 “Man and his Dwelling-place” was published and favourably received. Its success encouraged him to lay aside practice, reduce his expenses to a minimum, and take to writing as a profession. He settled in a little house at Tottenham, where his sitting-room was of such dimensions that he used to say he could open the door with one hand, poke the fire with the other, and had nature given him a third, open the window with it, without rising from his seat.
At first success attended the venture. Thackeray accepted for the Cornhill Magazine the series of “Physiological Riddles,” with the remark “Whatever else this fellow can do, he can write!” These were afterwards published, with others, under the title “Life in Nature.” “Thoughts on Health” were also contributed to the Cornhill. But his mind continued in such activity of growth, ever full, ever changing, that he had not time to write his thoughts in form for publication, and he was forced back into practice, which he had not quite renounced, continuing to see a few aural patients twice a week at his father’s house. In 1863 he was appointed aural surgeon to Guy’s Hospital, and took a house in George Street, Hanover Square, for the purpose of aural practice. With heroic and costly resolution, knowing he could not adequately do his work as an aural surgeon and devote himself to philosophy, he locked his manuscripts away from his sight.
Henceforward he rapidly succeeded in practice. In 1866 he took the place vacated by the death of his valued friend Toynbee, removing to his house in Savile Row. When in full practice, and not allowing himself to write, his chief life was in conversation. A few lines may be here quoted from Miss Hopkins’ Life of Hinton. “It is difficult to give any adequate idea of the charms of Mr. Hinton’s conversation to a mind at all in harmony with his own. His most marked peculiarity was the intensely emotional character of his intellect. Nature to him was no cold abstraction, no cunningly contrived machine made up of matter and force, but a mighty spiritual presence, a living being, tenderly and passionately beloved. The laws of nature were to him the habits of a dear and intimate friend.... But keen as was his delight in purely intellectual operations, he valued everything chiefly, if not only, in its relation to the moral.... How often, from some comparatively remote region of thought, or of art, would he flash down a light upon some practical matter, showing perhaps a neglected duty in its vital relations, or revealing an order in what looked like moral waste and confusion. Owing to this strong recognition of the spiritual unity of all life, never was there a man in whom the barrier between the religious and the secular was more completely effaced.”
In 1869 his success in aural surgery was so assured, that an eminent surgeon suggested to Mr. Hinton that he might justifiably resume his philosophy as an evening recreation. So after six years’ abstinence he resumed his writing. But his thoughts, allowed once more to spring into full activity, were certain to master him. “Wherever he was, at a friend’s house, in the street, at church, at a concert, he jotted down his notes on scraps of paper, backs of envelopes, bills, and programmes, writing them out in full in the evening.” Finally, these thoughts were printed for his own private use, and from them a great portion of his posthumous works is derived.
At last he had made money enough by practice to retire. His parting gift to his profession was contained in “The Questions of Aural Surgery,” a work of standard value; and his “Atlas of Diseases of the Membrana Tympani.” In March 1874 he retired, but with a constitution deeply injured by overwork and excess of feeling and thought. His father had died the year before; his mother died in 1874. He continued incessantly working, writing, thinking, studying mankind in the streets and alleys of London, or in the colliers’ cottages in South Wales, and came to suffer much from sleeplessness. When he set sail in the autumn of 1875 for the Azores, where Mrs. Hinton had preceded him, he was already seriously ill. At last he was seized with inflammation of the brain, and died on December 16, 1875, a martyr to his intense passion for the good of mankind. Of his intellectual, ethical, and religious views this is not the place to speak at large; his books must be left to explain themselves to kindred spirits.