Dr. Moxon[15] says:—
“If we ask what gave him that most valuable power of estimating what was worth doing, and what could be done—the power which Bacon calls the ‘mathematics of the mind’—we find the reply, I believe, in these great facts of his history. Firstly, that he was a man who had a free youth, not over-taught, nor over-strained; and, secondly, that in his manhood he worked with an eye to usefulness and duty, and not only to notoriety, nor to the mere cry of ‘who will show us something new?’ Indeed, the main and distinctive feature of his noble life was his resolute pursuit of the practical aim of his profession, to establish sound laws for scientific surgery and medicine. I have said that the wonderful store of facts he collected constituted answers to questions: Hunter the physiologist answering the questions of Hunter the surgeon. He did not so follow physiology as to turn it away from usefulness. And the results of his work he puts up in his museum. And he will gladly have anything for his collection. But always putting things by in their physiological order, mark, so that in due time they shall answer to his further questions. He will lecture on surgical principles,—true ones they must be,—if he changes them yearly in accordance with his observations. But he will not, he cannot, lecture on comparative anatomy or zoology. Why not? It does not conform enough with his main bent to surgery, to practical aim, to a duty. He believes in a vital principle, therefore he must have an aim before him. He succeeds in his aim; and by the masterly introduction of the operation on aneurism which bears his name he saves thousands from a painful death. Led further by the same enthusiasm for the true purpose of his life as a surgeon, he inoculates his frame with a loathsome disease that he may have it always by him to study it, regardless of danger and of pain.”
Sir James Paget’s views[16] are thus expressed:—
“The range of Hunter’s work matched with the time devoted to it. Never before or since—I think I am safe in saying this—was any one a thorough investigator and student in so wide a range of science. He was an enthusiastic naturalist; as a comparative anatomist and physiologist he was unequalled in his time; among the few pathologists he was the best; among the still fewer geologists and students of vegetable physiology, he was one, if not the chief; and he was a great practical surgeon. He was surgeon to a large hospital in London, and for many years held the largest practice in the metropolis. In all these things at one time no one but Hunter ever was eminent and successful.... There is not one of them in which he did not make investigations wholly original—not one of them of which he did not enlarge the area very far beyond that which had been covered by his predecessors—not one of them in which he did not leave facts and principles on record which it is impossible to count and very hard to estimate.
“In all these characters of Hunter’s works we see that which was the dominant character of his mind—massiveness and grandeur of design were indicated in all to which he applied himself. And in perfect harmony with this was the simplicity of his ordinary method of work. It consisted mainly in the orderly accumulation of facts from every source, of every kind, and building them up in the simplest inductions. If he had been an architect, he would have built huge pyramids, and every stone would have borne its own inscription. He knew nothing of logic or the science of thought. He used his mental power as with a natural instinct. He worked with all his might, but without art. I know no instance so striking as in him of the living force which there is in facts when they are stored in a thoughtful mind.
“But Hunter was not only a great observer, he was a very acute one. I think it would be difficult to find in all the masses of facts which he has recorded any one which was either observed or recorded erroneously. If there are errors in his works, they are the errors of reasoning, not of observation. And it may be noted, as a singular example of his accuracy, that when he tells his inferences it is generally with expressions implying that he regarded them as only probable: a fact he tells without conditions; when he generalises, it is with ‘I suspect,’ ‘I believe,’ ‘I am disposed to think,’ or the like.... He seems to have thought he had never reached farther than the nearest approach to truth, which was at that time attainable, and that a year or more of investigation would bring him nearer to the truth, and then that which now seemed right would be surpassed or set aside. He used to say to his pupils in his lectures, ‘Do not take notes of this; I daresay I shall change it all next year.’”
Abernethy, who knew him well, says: “It is scarcely credible with what pains Mr. Hunter examined the lower kinds of animals,” and he quotes Mr. Clift as saying that “he would stand for hours motionless as a statue, except that with a pair of forceps in either hand he was picking asunder the connecting fibres of some structure” that he was examining: ... “patient and watchful as a prophet, sure that the truth would come: it might be in the unveiling of some new structure, or in the clearing up of some mental cloud; or it might be as in a flash, in which, as with inspiration, intellectual darkness becomes light.”
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Author of the defamatory so-called Life of John Hunter, 1794.
[13] “Life of John Hunter,” by Drewry Ottley, 1835.