CHAPTER XIV. JOHN HUNTER. T was in 1783 that John Hunter became owner of the house No. 28, on the east side of Leicester Fields, and of the ground behind it as far as a house in Castle Street, which he bought at the same time. Between 1783 and 1785 he was busy building on the ground between the two houses the premises for the reception of his Museum of Comparative and Pathological Anatomy, and removing it thither from Jermyn Street. In 1785 the museum was placed in its new home-a hall 52 ft. long by 28 ft. wide, lighted from the top, with a gallery all round; under it was a lecture theatre and a room which served for the meetings of the Lyceum Medicum, a society for the promotion of medical and surgical science, founded a few years after this time by Hunter and Fordyce.1 In the Castle Street house the different departments of human and comparative anatomy were carried on. When he bought the Leicester Fields house, Hunter was in his fifty-fifth year, in the full vigour of his powers both as surgeon, anatomist, and observer, in the first rank of his profession and the full tide of practice, earning an income which at its highest reached £6000 a year, every penny of which, beyond the expenses of his establishment in Leicester Fields and his house and grounds at Earl's Court, was absorbed by his museum. Hunter was now living that life of intense scientific labour of which both the course and the results have been described by Professor Owen in the addition he has so kindly made to this 1 The premises were afterwards successively a Gallery for the exhibition and sale of pictures, and a Museum of the Mechanical Arts and National Manufactures, and are now the head-quarters, with drill-shed, club-room, armoury and accoutrement-store, of the Middlesex Volunteer Artillery. All Hunter's additions are still standing, though with considerable internal alterations. memoir. He stands as complete a type of the scientific surgeon, as Newton of the serene philosopher; the one investigating the laws of animal life and structure with as single-minded and intense an application, as the other the wider laws of light, matter, and motion. It was now thirty-five years since John Hunter had come up to London (1748), after an idle boyhood, from the family home at Long Calderwood in Lanarkshire,' to join his brother William, who seven years before had settled in London, and had already established himself as the first anatomical lecturer and teacher of his time. A turn for anatomy seems to have run in the family. Besides William, the eldest brother, James, left law for anatomical study, and would, William thought, have attained the highest rank both as anatomist and physician, had he not been 1 About eight miles from Glasgow, in the parish of Kilbride East. His father was a yeoman, living on a small ancestral estate, dating back to Robert the Second. John was the youngest of ten children, left at the age of ten (1738) to the sole care of an indulgent mother, and allowed to grow up with a minimum of book-learning or school discipline. prematurely cut off by consumption. Like James, John went up to join his brother, without any known preparation of medical study, from his desultory home-life at Calderwood, after a short sojourn in Glasgow with a jovial brother-in-law, who in a few years tippled and sang away a good cabinet-making business. When John Hunter, a keen, shrewd, rough Lowland lad of twenty, rode up to London in September, 1748, the road to his profession was not the beaten track it is now. We hear of the youngster-who might have had a cabinet-maker's tool in hand, but is not known ever to have handled a scalpel-being set to prepare for his brother's lecture a dissection of the muscles of the arm. Had James's instruments and books remained after his early death in the farmhouse at Long Calderwood, and had John taken these up, in the interval between his short sojourn in Glasgow and his joining William in London? Or had he followed his bent, and attended anatomical lectures in Glasgow ? It is difficult to believe he could have at once entered William's dissecting-room and made himself useful, as his biographers describe, without some previous preparation. In the first session after his coming, he is said to have directed the pupils in their dissections. William entered John at Chelsea Hospital as a pupil of Cheselden, the first surgeon of the day. He attended his lectures and operations in the summer months of 1749, '50, giving the winter to his brother's dissecting room. Cheselden's retirement-owing to a stroke of paralysis-in 1751, put an end to his studies under that able master. It is interesting to know that up to this time Hunter was Jack Hunter," with his associates, a rough, jovial, pleasure-loving young fellow, but with a smack of humorous intellectual character in his pleasures,' fond of seeing life in queer, low places. He was even a favourite with the "resurrection-men," whom the anatomists had then to look to for subjects, and 1 He was a great haunter of the shilling gallery of the playhouse, and there noted for his vigour in "damning," then a salutary usage. He was as fond of pictures as of plays; a frequenter perhaps of Old Slaughter's, for he was always a particular friend of the engravers, Vivarès, Woollett (who lived at 11, Green Street, close by, where he used to fire a patteraro from the house-top on finishing a plate) and Pine, who used to meet there. At this time he may have often rubbed shoulders with Hogarth, to whom he seems to me to bear a considerable resemblance in character. C C |