large hospital to attend the Sick, and dissect the dead.”^17 William was
surely referencing his own brother as he wrote this, favoring a candidate
who came from a proper anatomic training as opposed to an adolescent
who had tagged along with an unlearned surgeon in a perpetual line of
ignorant and barbaric imposters.
Although John Hunter trained under the finest surgeons, first Cheselden
and later Percivall Pott at St. Bartholomew’s, he never lost his bizarre,
outlandish, and even savage tendencies. To appreciate how dedicated
Hunter was to anatomy and the dissection of the dead, consider that he
regarded the sense of taste as a critical component in the physician’s
armamentarium. “The gastric juice is a fluid somewhat transparent, and
little brackish to the taste.”^18 Gloves for dissection would not be available
for another century, but one wonders what would compel Mr. Hunter to
draw his fetid fingers to his mouth and sample the residue of any exudate
or detritus. He was at the precipice of comprehending the organ basis of
disease (as pioneered by Giovanni Morgagni), and apparently nothing was
off-limits in his quest to understand the body. “The semen would appear,
both from the smell and taste, to be a mawkish kind of substance, but
when held some time in the mouth, it produces a warmth similar to spices,
which lasts some time.”^19
Many who attend medical school exhibit a normal aversion for putrid
smells, necessarily prohibiting the conquest of surgical and gynecological
specialties. Ask any general surgeon or gynecologist who has a standard
practice when was the last time they faced a repulsive smell so pungent
they were gagging and retching, and they will readily regale you with a
tale of woe. A selection process that weeds out applicants with an
incapacitating disgust for malodor happens in every medical school. Those
who can “stomach” putrescence may continue on; those with “weak
constitutions” (read: normal) go into specialties like dermatology and
radiology. Even grizzled and gruff veterans of the operating room cannot
overcome the deeply programmed “disgust as a disease-avoidance
mechanism”^20 in severe cases, that in the end serves to protect us from
potentially life-threatening infections. Posterity is grateful that John
Hunter seems to have had no capacity for revulsion, which, combined with
his spirit of inquiry and dogged determination, propelled him to be the
preeminent surgical figure of his time.