It remained for another learned physician, a century later, to deal with these counter-claims, and whilst admitting their vague individual conceptions of an elusive mystery, to establish once and for ever William Harvey’s inalienable right as sole discoverer.
This notable champion was John Freind, m.d., f.r.s., distinguished as the Medical Historian, and Harveian lecturer to the College of Physicians, at a time when he and his fellows shaved their heads and mounted Ramillies wigs as outward guarantees for the profundity of wisdom they enshrined.
But apart from his flowing wig, or his defence of Harvey, or his learned medical history, written in part when he was a prisoner in the Tower for supposed complicity in the Atterbury Plot, or for skill in the treatment of disease, John Freind had a pioneer’s claim to distinction.
The doctor, strange to say, was a Member of Parliament, and on resuming his seat on his release from incarceration, he brought before the House of Commons, in 1725, a remarkable petition from the Royal College of Physicians, to restrain “the pernicious use of spirituous liquors.” And though he might speak but as the mouthpiece of his brother Fellows, it needed no small degree of courage to broach such a subject in those days of general coarse indulgence among all classes; especially if his own language was as direct and forcible as that of the petitioners.
Therefore, in his triple character as the historian of medicine, as the champion of William Harvey, and as the foremost M.P. to advocate the cause of temperance before our national legislative assembly, John Freind, M.D., claims a niche in our Walhalla of notable old doctors.
In the nave of Westminster Abbey on a memorial of polished granite is this inscription—“Beneath are deposited the remains of John Hunter, born at Long Calderwood, Lanarkshire, N.B., on February 14th, 1728; died in London on October 10th, 1793. His remains were removed from the Church of St. Martins-in-the-Fields to this Abbey on March 28th, 1858. The Royal College of Surgeons of England have placed this table over the grave of Hunter to record their admiration of his genius as a gifted interpreter of the Divine power and wisdom that works in the laws of organic life, and their grateful veneration for his services to mankind as the Father of scientific surgery. ‘O Lord, how manifold are Thy works; in wisdom hast Thou made them all.’”
Such honours are not paid to the remains of men of common stamp. And of no common stamp was the sandy-headed youth who, having spent ten years of his life learning cabinet making, resolved on striking out a better career for himself; and in his twentieth year took horse and journeyed to London to place himself under his elder brother, William Hunter, then rising into note as a medical practitioner and a teacher of anatomy. In October, 1748, he entered his brother’s dissecting room, and whether the fitting of joints in cabinetware had been of initiatory service, or he had had access to the books of his medical relations in Glasgow, or that as a boy upon his father’s farm, observation of the domestic animals and of the wild inhabitants of wood and fell, had roused the desire to master the secrets of animated nature, sure it is that William speedily foretold a successful future for his new pupil as an anatomist.
At all events he used his interest to place his promising brother under the eminent surgeon of Chelsea Hospital, and later under another at St. Bartholomew’s. Then, shocked by the rough speech and manners of his countrified brother, and his need of education, the classical elder packed him off to college to pick up a little refinement along with Latin and Greek.
In vain. Irrepressible and hot-tempered John could not sit down quietly to study dead languages. Back he came from Oxford in haste, to study dead bodies in his brother’s dissecting room, and serve as demonstrator to his course of lectures, simultaneously with his study of living bodies at St. George’s Hospital, where in a comparatively short time he became house-surgeon.
His appointment as staff-surgeon to our troops on foreign service marked the six intervening years before he settled down to practise in London. He had laboured ten years on human anatomy, and had dissected a number of the lower animals, laying the foundation of his collection of comparative anatomy. Even while on foreign service he had amused himself with studying the digestive faculties of snakes and lizards when in a torpid state, and many were the contributions he sent home to his brother’s museum.