consumption, not dissimilar from his American philosophical
contemporary in Monticello.
John Hunter died in 1793 while attending a hospital staff meeting at St.
George’s Hospital in London. Involved in a debate over house staff,
Hunter’s last moments were characterized in fury; he “died, as he had
lived, in rebellion, speaking his mind.”^39 The primitive surgery he
practiced, without anesthesia and with no understanding of sterility, was
mostly associated with removal of stones, cysts, and rudimentary
treatment of traumatic wounds. A half century after his death would herald
the arrival of ether and usher in a new way of placating man before the
surgeon’s knife.
The prototype for Langenbeck in Berlin, Billroth in Vienna, and Lister
in the United Kingdom, Hunter finished his career without washing his
hands, or dreaming of germs. In one of medicine’s great ironies, the giant
of surgery with almost no formal education had the greatest impact on the
scientific training of surgeons. He theorized that “A hospital ... should be
not only a charitable institution offering aid to the poor—indeed, even a
place where surgeons gained experience before trying their luck on
wealthier clients—but also a center for educating the surgeons of the
future.”^40 “My motive,” Hunter concluded, “was in the first place to serve
the Hospital and in the second to diffuse the knowledge of the art that all
might be partakers of it.”^41
When another young Philadelphian arrived in London shortly before
Hunter’s death, the pupil’s father asked Hunter what books his son would
need to read, “Hunter simply led the way to his dissecting room, where
several open cadavers lay, and declared, ‘These are the books your son will
learn under my direction; the others are fit for very little.’”^42 Hunter, of
course, was correct. Almost nothing in any medical textbook in the 18th
century regarding the causes and treatment of disease is accurate or
beneficial.
With surgical science in its infancy, Galenic medicine was in its death
throes. A century before, at the death of William Harvey, a sobering
recollection of Hippocratic faith was exercised. Suffering a stroke in 1657,
William Harvey found himself unable to speak, with “dead palsy in his
tongue.”^43 Summoning his apothecary, Harvey motioned to have his
tongue sliced open, completely in line with Galenic humoral conjecture