A quirky 'knife man'
You might not have wanted to live next door to John Hunter, surgeon extraordinaire of the 18th century. His small estate outside London teemed with exotic creatures like leopards and Asian buffaloes. Jackals and dogs howled in kennels. His oil lamps flickered into the morning hours as he meticulously dissected human corpses spirited from their resting places in London's cemeteries. But if you needed surgery, you sought out Hunter. In the mid-1700s, when major surgery often was a euphemism for amputation—with patients awake and antibiotics far in the future—he offered at least some hope. Fellow surgeons in his hospital couldn't abide him, and he was in turn contemptuous of them. Wendy Moore's The Knife Man: the Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery dissects this brusque, brilliant, impatient man, admired by the surgeons of today but a stranger to the lay public.
Why is Hunter considered the father of modern surgery?
He changed the whole culture of surgery. Before him, surgeons based their training on the classic Greek theory of humors—if you were ill, your body had the wrong balance of good and bad humors, and you needed to let the bad humors out. So bleeding was the order of the day. Also, surgeons were trained as apprentices, to do exactly what their master had done, which was what his master had done, all according to what was written in the texts. Hunter didn't go along with that. He did not trust the written record—only the evidence of his own eyes. So he insisted on performing experiments. He insisted that everything be tried and tested. He questioned every practice. He was the first surgeon to embrace the scientific method.
Why didn't other surgeons adopt his methods?
It's not that they were butchers. There were competent surgeons who could amputate legs and arms, and they had to be fast, so their patients wouldn't die of shock or loss of blood. Without antibiotics, infection would set in, of course. In fact, surgeons believed that if there was no infection, the operation was not a success because the bad humors—the Greeks called it laudable pus—were not escaping. But often surgeons did more harm than they did good, and they had their heads in the sand. Their minds were not attuned to scientific approach. Hunter trained on his own. He had no loyalties. A lot of his rivals felt threatened by him. He represented a danger to their livelihood. He kicked off a revolution, but it was gradual.
The ways he went about some of his projects weren't exactly above criticism, like giving poor kids a few pennies to yank out a tooth to transplant into a wealthy patient.
In a way it was quite a hard book to research, because it's easier to write a book about somebody who was a hero, and Hunter did adopt very dubious methods. I tried to look at what he did in the context of his time, when body snatching, to take another example, was quite accepted. Before he tried tooth transplants, other people had tried the same thing, also taking teeth from street children. I found it quite dubious, but that is what went on.
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