The_Invention_of_Surgery

Hunter continued to build up his menagerie of animals and surgical
specimens. His appetite (and forbearance) for the diseased and desperate
further propelled his practice, particularly as a St. George’s Hospital
surgeon. The hospital’s location in close proximity to Buckingham House
and St. James’s Palace strengthened William’s entitlement as Queen
Charlotte’s physician and obstetrician, but it seemed impossible that John
Hunter could ascend to such a lofty title.
John Hunter’s enthusiasm and masterful teaching skills translated well
from the simple anatomy school at Covent Garden to the prestigious
confines at St. George’s. The uncouth and uneducated Scotsman had been
transformed into the most advanced scientific thinker among surgeons in
the English capital, and an amazing five hundred pupils would fall under
his spell of skepticism and investigation in the coming decades. His
dedication in animal experimentation and the assiduous collecting of
surgical specimens slowly convinced him that the ancient notions of
disease and humoral imbalances were ill-conceived.
The ancients were gravely mistaken when they intervened in the midst
of disease without understanding the disease process. Hunter’s
predecessors stumbled in the dark, but he conceived simple experiments to
comprehend healing, inflammation, and disease processes. Warmed by a
log fire, armed with the most primitive instruments, and scrutinizing by
candlelight, Hunter carried out investigations on an assortment of animals
and conditions. Nothing was off-limits—not even his own body.
Georgian London was overwhelmed by sexually transmitted diseases
(including syphilis and gonorrhea), the result of casual sex in the chief
port city of the empire. Still a century from a consensus on germ theory,
venereal diseases were the most convincing examples that microscopic
terrors were to blame for the transmission of disease from one paramour
to the next, but there was still no identification of the culprit. Hunter was
determined to investigate one aspect of disease transmission: could the
crusty discharge from a syphilitic patient alone be the carrier of disease
from lover to lover? Additionally, Hunter was trying to determine if
gonorrhea and syphilis were actually two separate diseases, or were they
simply different manifestations of the same disease? To investigate this,
Hunter conceived a plan to inoculate a symptom-free patient with no
history of venereal disease with a sample of the milky-white discharge
from a gonorrhea patient. But where to find a volunteer who would