knowingly submit to the application of the discharge from the festering
wound of a venereal victim ... onto the innocent’s penis? How about a
body snatching surgeon?
Hunter recorded, in the third person in exacting detail, on the results of
his stunning experiment of self-contamination. He never identified the
patient, but most scholars agree that Hunter was himself the guinea pig. In
May 1767, Hunter recorded, “Two punctures were made on the penis with
a lancet dipped in venereal matter from a gonorrhea [milky discharge];
one puncture was on the glans, the other on the prepuce. This was on
Friday; on the Sunday following there was a teasing itching in those parts,
which lasted till the Tuesday following.”^33 Several colleagues and
students recorded contemporaneous accounts of Hunter admitting that he
had given himself a chancre, sobering evidence that John Hunter would
stop at nothing to delve into the mysteries of the human body.
As the days progressed, there was a “teasing itching” in the penis that
blossomed into infected scabs that soon generated a discharge and “a little
pouting of the lips of the urethra, also a sensation in it making water, so
that a discharge was expected from it.”^34 Still not sure if he was
experiencing gonorrhea or confronting the early stages of syphilis, he
realized within ten days that syphilis was now embryonically emerging
within his body, with ulcerated chancres growing at the end of his penis
and the development of glandular swelling in his groin. Was Hunter mad,
or so insatiably curious that his utter lack of self-preservation led him to
needlessly condemn himself to a lifelong pestilence? Dear Reader, ponder
the verity that gonorrhea is often self-limited and does not recur; syphilis,
on the other hand, is a lifelong infestation of a bacteria that visits its
victim in waves over the course of years in three primary manifestations,
including a brain and spinal cord infection that leads to madness in the
final, or tertiary, stages. This is the bacteria that Mr. Hunter was
intentionally smearing on self-inflicted lacerations on his male member.
Seven months after infecting himself, John Hunter developed “copper
coloured blotches” on his skin and was experiencing ulcerations on his
tonsils. For the next three years he was daubing mercury on his sores until
a quiescence finally occurred. It is not known if he ever suffered from
tertiary syphilis, but his final demise as a sixty-five-year-old was from
cardiac disease, a possible connection to syphilis in up to one-third of
untreated patients. Hunter’s horrifying tolerance of auto-experimentation