The next great scholar to whose life and works I would invite your attention for a moment, is Morgagni, born in Italy in 1682, died in 1772. He was a pupil of Valsalva, whose assistant he became at the age of nineteen. Brought up in this way, as it were in the domain of anatomy, it is not strange that he devoted his attention throughout his life especially to the anatomical products of disease. It matters little to us now that he was wont to regard these products as the causes of disease and thus neglected their remote causes. He it was who taught us to apply to pathological anatomy the same scrupulous attention to tissue alterations and changes which the ordinary anatomist would note in dissecting a new animal form. He was scarcely the founder of the science of pathological anatomy, for this credit belongs to Benivieni, but he did very much to popularize the study and to show its importance. More than this, he wrote a work which for his day and generation was colossal. It bore the title "De Sedibus et Causis Morborum per Anatomen Indagatis." It consisted of five books. The first appeared in Venice in 1761. This proved a perfect mine of information to which one may often turn even to-day, and read with wonder the observations published one hundred and fifty years ago. They stamp Morgagni as a great scientist as well as anatomist. His industry will be indicated by the fact that even after he became blind he did not cease to work.
Perhaps the most wonderful figure in the whole history of modern medicine is that of Albrecht von Haller, of Berne, born 1708, died 1777, and often known as the Great. No more versatile genius than his has ever adorned our profession. A most precocious child, he developed remarkable abilities in the direction of poetry and music, as well as medicine, and the only wonder is that he lived to such a ripe old age, enjoying the fruits of his labors, having displayed throughout his entire life an industry and productiveness which were most remarkable. Before he reached the age of ten he had written a Chaldee grammar, a Greek and Hebrew vocabulary, and a large collection of Latin verses and biographies. During the next few years he translated many of the Latin authors, and wrote an original epic poem of some four thousand verses on the Swiss Confederacy. All of this work he had completed by the age of twenty-one. It is not strange that among those who knew of his precocity he was generally known and regarded as a "wonder child." It will thus be seen, too, that medicine was but one of the many subjects of his study. He studied a year in Tübingen, where the riotous living of his fellow students repelled him; then he went to Leyden, falling there under the influence of the illustrious Boerhaave. How much he drew from this source no man may accurately say at present, but a more brilliant example he certainly could not have had. He finished his studies in Leyden before he was twenty and then traveled through England and France, but was compelled to flee from Paris to escape arrest for hiding cadavers in his room for purposes of dissection. This will prove an evidence of taste for study if not of taste in other directions.
Suddenly developing a passion for mathematics, he went to Basle and worked so hard as to almost ruin his health. This necessitated a trip to the mountains and here his interest in botany was aroused and indirectly that in medicine continued. Soon after he returned to Berne to take up the practice of medicine. Here he studied and worked so hard as to arouse a suspicion of his sanity, but he kept up his health by frequent trips to the Alps in search of flowers. His fondness for botany and his taste for poetry seemed to grow with equal pace and he seems to have been among the first of modern students to appreciate the beauty and grandeur of Swiss mountain scenery. When he was twenty-five years of age appeared the first edition of his poems, many editions appearing later. Here in Berne also he published so many essays on botany, anatomy and physiology that widespread attention was attracted to his eminent learning, and he was called to fill the chair of anatomy and botany in the new university of Göttingen, where he spent seventeen years of extraordinary mental activity, publishing countless papers and at the same time continuing his poetic and his nomadic habits. He established in Göttingen a great botanic garden, founded scientific societies, published five books on anatomy, all elaborately illustrated, printed a series of commentaries on Boerhaave's lectures, and is said to have contributed altogether thirteen thousand articles relating to almost every branch of human knowledge. It is not strange that the fame of the University of Göttingen depended largely upon Haller's reputation.
But Haller developed a clear case of nostalgia, and after being fêted by the nobility, honored by almost every monarch in Europe, and receiving every honor that universities and philosophic societies confer, he resigned from his chair in Göttingen and returned to Berne, to his fatherland. Here, amid his old home surroundings, he worked for twenty years more at the same tremendous rate, discharging diverse duties of state and private citizenship, founding and promoting industries and asylums, and serving constantly upon commissions of all kinds. While thus engaged appeared that phenomenal work, his great Treatise on Physiology, so full of original observations that it has been stated that should discoveries which have been re-discovered since Haller be collected they would fill several quarto volumes. The physiological institute of Berne is to-day known as the Hallerianum, as it should be, for it is distinctly the product of his genius. He died at a ripe age, after having performed an incredible amount of work, the greatest scholar of his own or perhaps of any century, revered and honored, faithful to the last and exhibiting in his last moments that "philosophic calmness of the cultivated intellect" of which Cicero loved to write. It is related of him that on his deathbed he kept his fingers on his own wrist, watching the ebbing away of his own existence and waiting for the last pulsation from his radial artery. Finally he exclaimed, "I no longer feel it," and then joined the great majority.
Perhaps Haller's greatest contribution to physiological lore was his doctrine of irritability of tissues. It took the place of much that had caused previous discussion and is accepted to-day as explaining, as nearly as we can explain, numerous phenomena.
In this same great wonder-century lived also John Hunter, the greatest of England's medical students, the most famous surgeon of his day and the most indefatigable collector in natural history and natural science that ever lived. He was born in 1728 and died in 1783. He was led to study medicine by the fame of his illustrious brother William, and began his studies by acting as prosector for him. He soon became a pupil of Cheselden, perhaps the most famous English surgeon of his generation. Hunter developed very early those extraordinary powers of observation and that originality in investigation which later made him so famous. Early in his medical career he came for a time under the influence of Percival Pott. This was at a time when surgery had emerged from barbarism and when the French Academy of Surgery had erected it into the dignity of a science. He entered St. George's Hospital in 1754 as a surgeon's pupil. Later he became a partner with his brother in the latter's private school of anatomy, but John, being a poor lecturer, was distinguished by his services in the dissecting-room rather than in the amphitheater. The customs of his time and the jealousies of the various medical factions then existing in London led to numerous acrimonious disputes, in the literary part of which William Hunter, who was much the more cultured student, took the lead, while John, who lacked in scholastic ability and had much less education, was relied on to supply the anatomical data. John was painfully aware of his deficiencies in literary culture and is said once to have replied to the disparaging remarks of an opponent: "He accuses me of not understanding the dead languages, but I could tell him that on the dead body which he never knew in any language living or dead."
It was in this way that he was led into unseemly encounters with the Munros, of Edinburgh, and with his late teacher, Pott. The same sort of dispute finally separated the two brothers, and they parted company after a very unseemly exhibition of jealousy and fraternal discord.
After studying human anatomy for several years, John Hunter became profoundly impressed with the need for much larger knowledge of comparative anatomy, but about this time ill health compelled a temporary change and so he went into the army as a staff surgeon. This was at the time when Europe was engaged in the sanguinary Seven Years' War, and so it happened that Hunter had ample opportunity for studies and observations in military surgery—at the siege of Belleisle and later in the war in the Peninsula. Here he made many of those observations on gunshot wounds which he published at various periods later and which helped to make him famous.
He resumed his work in London in 1763, and here again he had to undergo a long trial of those qualities of passive fortitude and active perseverance under difficulties which were his prominent characteristics. His personal needs were small but his scientific requirements were large, and to these latter he devoted every guinea which he could earn in his small but slowly growing practice. His own manners were so brusque, and he was so lacking in the refinement of many of his colleagues and competitors, that it took rare mental qualities to force him to the front, to which he nevertheless rapidly advanced. Bacon has said, "He that is only real had need of exceeding great parts of virtue, as the stone had need be rich that is set without foil," and this was never more true than in John Hunter's case. His leisure hours were never unemployed. He obtained the bodies of all animals dying in the public collections in London and so began to form that enormous collection which became known later as the Hunterian Museum. As his means afforded it he built and added to his accommodations and carried on those vast researches into animal anatomy and physiology to which the balance of his life was devoted. Although his practice gradually increased and he became in time the most famous surgeon and consultant in London, he used, nevertheless, to spend three or four hours every morning before breakfast in dissection of animals, and as much of the rest of the day as he could spare. Pupils and students who wished to consult him had to come early in the morning, often as early as four o'clock, in order to find him disengaged. He had that rare ability to do a maximum of work with a minimum of sleep which has been so conspicuous in the case of Virchow. Before he died, Hunter attained to a large competence, and his anatomical collection, consisting of some ten thousand preparations, made largely with his own hands, was purchased after his death by the Government, for seventy-five thousand dollars, and presented to the College of Surgeons where it forms the chief part of the so-called Hunterian Museum.
Hunter's principal claims to greatness obtain in this, that he not only brought the light of physiology to bear upon the practice of our art, but by his writings and teachings and especially by his example led men to follow along the paths he cleared for them. It is no small claim to glory to be known by such pupils as Hunter had. By these, by his colossal industry in building up his museum, and by his writings, he will ever be known as the most prominent figure in the medical history of Great Britain.