demands repudiation and simultaneous recognition of his dedication in the
face of ignorance.
While wrestling with Hunter’s recklessness, students of medical history
must acknowledge that surgeons have often been immune to revulsion,
even to the point of self-sacrifice. A certain resistance to disgust coincides
with an odium of disease; these oddly balanced impulses explain many
breakthroughs in healthcare. Like firefighters who abhor fire, yet
derisively run headlong into a conflagration, healers despise—even dread
—microbes while thrusting themselves in the middle of pandemics. John
Hunter serves as the bridge between medieval surgical bleeders and the
first surgeon-scientists. Explorers and pioneers are prepared to live in the
wilderness in primitive habitations; Hunter was willing to dwell in the
morass of unenlightened surgery, establishing a foundation of surgical
science. “Hunter believed all surgery should be governed by scientific
principles, which were based on reasoning, observation, and
experimentation.”^35
Hunter’s lectures were often iconoclastic, and he was one of the first
surgeons to suggest that “bloodletting was not just largely ineffectual but
potentially dangerous ...”^36 The next generation of famous British
surgeons, legendary in their own right, are the ones who best capture the
impact of Hunter on modern surgery. Henry Cline, the president of the
Royal College of Surgeons, first attended Hunter’s lectures out of simple
curiosity, and after first hearing him, said, “When I heard this Man, I said
to myself, This is all day-light. I felt that what I had previously been
taught was comparatively nothing ... and thought I might, like Mr. Hunter,
venture to Think for myself.”^37 John Abernethy, another renowned London
surgeon from St. Bartholomew’s, concluded, “I believe him to the author
of a great and important revolution in medical science ... of this I am
certain, that his works produced a complete revolution in my mind.”^38
The complex John Hunter would be named surgeon to King George III
in 1776, the year of another revolution. The man who some say is the basis
of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde—from his front-of-the-house prestigious medical
practice on Leicester Square and nefarious backdoor entrance for middle-
of-the-night deliveries of stolen bodies—is undoubtedly the founder of
surgical science. His massive collection of surgical specimens and
medical curiosities were donated to the Royal College of Surgery from his
penniless estate, exhausted from a lifetime of exploration, spending, and