Pioneer Pathologist

THE RELUCTANT SURGEON (359 pp.)--John Kobler--Doubleday ($4.95).

The 18th century's greatest physician looked and acted like some crazed quack in a horror movie. A squat, curmudgeonly eccentric, he jounced through London in a cart hauled by three Asiatic water buffaloes. A moatless drawbridge guarded his rambling home at 12 Leicester Square. In the fetid basement of his country villa, a vast copper cauldron was kept at the boil; there he melted down human and animal corpses to get fresh skeletons for his grisly pathological museum of pickled fetuses, stuffed one-eyed pigs and cock-plumed hens. There may have been, as his contemporaries thought, more madness than method in his research, but dour John Hunter (1728-93) as much as any man helped turn surgery and pathology into sciences.

In this fluent, zestful biography, Author Kobler shows how, in the Age of Reason, John Hunter's profession was largely a slit-or-miss affair. Anesthesia was virtually unknown; patients scarcely drugged by doses of laudanum or brandy expected only death from the agony of the knife. Untrained midwives often ripped babies' heads from shoulders in the course of arduous labor. The cliquish Corporation of Surgeons had a near monopoly on cadavers for dissection; private anatomy teachers were forced to traffic with the "sack-'em-up men"--the body snatchers.

Sharp & Scholar. To the professional satisfaction of his older brother, William, a melancholy anatomist who became one of London's more fashionable physicians, John Hunter could bargain for corpses with the finesse of a whist sharp (which he was). But he had other talents too. A careless scholar, an indifferent cabinetmaker, John at 20 joined his brother's London medical school. He learned fast: within a year he was teaching one of William's dissecting classes; later he helped on his brother's major discovery--the first accurate descriptive anatomy of a pregnant uterus.

On his own, John gained a reputation, a growing surgical practice at St. George's Hospital and a household. He had married the daughter of a friend from his two-year career as an army surgeon-Anne Home, who bore him four children and wrote tidy verses to Franz Joseph Haydn's music. While John padded about his museum, Anne kept a salon graced by Johnson and Boswell, Lord Chesterfield and Gibbon. Some of Hunter's students came too: Edward Jenner, who administered the first successful vaccination; Philip Syng Physick, the "Father of American Surgery."

Pearls & Bees. John--"that dear man" to Anne's tea-sipping cronies--was all work, although his peers regarded it as play. He produced artificial pearls from mussels he kept in the bottom of his fish pond. While Anne plunked at her pianoforte, he listened until he fixed the exact note hummed by a swarm of bees (treble A above middle C). Obliging friends and zookeepers plied him with odd creatures for dissection. Only with reluctance did he take time for his patients. "I must go and earn this damn'd guinea," he complained, "or I shall be sure to want it tomorrow."

Eventually he did want for guineas. When Hunter died in 1793, heart-ailing and gouty, he was nearly bankrupt. Not even the sale of their country house kept Anne from the indignity of turning nanny.

Torpedoes & Trout. A lone wolf who scorned his fellow doctors, Hunter was perhaps too far ahead of his time to leave any single medical monument. He presented more than 50 papers to the Royal Society on everything from torpedoes to the hearing of trout, but only a handful of his findings--an analysis of the lym phatic vessels, his pathology of gunshot wounds--were used by others while he lived. Yet a century before Darwin's voy age, he pondered the mystery of natural selection; 50 years before Sir Charles Lyell, he dabbled in scientific geology.

"When we make a discovery in pathology," wrote one authority in 1818, "we only learn what we have overlooked in his writings or forgotten in his lectures." Ironically enough, what may have been Hunter's proudest experiment proved a deadly failure. In 1767, when the distinction between venereal diseases was still unclear, he infected himself with pus from a patient who had both gonorrhea and (unknown to Hunter) syphilis. The gonorrhea was cured; the untreated syphilis, Kobler suggests, probably killed him. But from Hunter's viewpoint, the tragedy was deeper: by concluding in his clas sic Treatise on the Venereal Disease that the infections were the same, he helped set back knowledge of venereal disease for a generation.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.