goods of porcelain, silk, and tea were in high demand from European
countries, but there was little reciprocal demand for European goods in
China. The solution was the British commercialization of opium
production in India and the sale of the highly addictive opium to Chinese
markets. With the flourishing opium market in the East, there was an
inevitable influx of the elixir back to Mother England and, not
surprisingly, a demand for morphine and its cousins—heroine and codeine.
Thomas Sydenham, considered the father of British medicine, prepared
a proprietary opium tincture that he termed “laudanum,” a blend of opium,
sherry alcohol, cinnamon, saffron, and cloves. Laudanum became a staple
of almost every English physician and surgeon, and allowed Hunter to
venture into previous prohibited lands in the century before ether and
chloroform. In fact, while it may be said that others may claim priority in
being the first important surgeon (men like Paré and Pott), Hunter alone is
the last great surgeon to operate without comprehensive anesthesia, and
whatever success he enjoyed was, in part, owed to opium.
The two years abroad achieved for Hunter what he might have hoped—
an acceptance among the well-placed and philosophically interested. He
never forfeited his disdain for etiquette nor his love of drink and coarse
language, but his “energy, breadth of interest, and ebullient manner”^31 won
him favor among the members of the Royal Society, who elected him as a
fellow in 1767 “as a person well skilled in Natural History and
Anatomy.”^32 Even within the prestigious society, Hunter ascended into a
secret splinter group that engaged in sometimes bellicose confabs in
London coffeehouses, with luminaries such as James Watt, James Cook,
and Nevil Maskelyne joining in the brouhahas.
John Hunter passed the oral examination at Surgeon’s Hall in 1768,
earning the diploma of the Company of Surgeons and finally the right to
call himself a surgeon. His pupils William Shippen and John Morgan had
already started the medical school in Philadelphia, and were professors of
surgery and medicine when Hunter had ultimately achieved the bona fide
title of surgeon. Within five months of earning his diploma, a
corresponding change was triggered for John Hunter, the appointment as
full-time surgeon as St. George’s Hospital (now The Lanesborough Hotel).
At age forty, the arc of accomplishment and increased notoriety continued
upward, now abruptly.