The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery Review

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The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery ReviewIt is hard to understand that the genius John Hunter, one of the star figures of the Enlightenment, should not be one of those scientists whom everyone has heard of. If the name does not ring a bell, it is strongly recommended that you pick up _The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery_ (Broadway Books) by Wendy Moore. Not just a genius in surgical technique and innovator of scientific experiment to guide surgical choices, he was a brilliant anatomist of other species as well, he was an attentive teacher, and he set up a museum that demonstrated the now accepted views of the origins of life and the age of the Earth. He was constantly attentive to animal behavior and physiology and his curiosity never stopped. A mainstay to his friends, he was also willful and irascible, and made enemies easily, one of the reasons he got limited credit during his lifetime for his new ways of thinking. Moore's book is an exhilarating view of a foolhardy, energetic, innovative, and brilliant man.
John Hunter was born in 1728 in Scotland. He left school at thirteen, and left Oxford after just two months. He instead followed his older brother William to London to help in William's anatomy school in Covent Garden. He would dissect thousands of bodies, and was well acquainted with the "resurrection men", the grave robbers who provided fresh, or maybe not so fresh, specimens. Hunter's reliance on observation and experiment put him squarely against the medical establishment, which had insisted on relying on Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen, "preferring to bleed, blister, and purge their patients to early graves." He alienated his fellow surgeons by insisting that surgery was always the last step that should be taken, and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. His innovations in surgery include teaching (from his days as a naval surgeon) that musket balls entering the body were best left where they were, if possible; digging them out did more damage than the bullet itself. He knew the value of using a placebo when testing a medicine's powers. He made the first experimentation (on dogs) to show what the lymphatic system did. Not only was he not above dealing with the resurrection men, but he tricked the friends of Charles Byrne ("The Irish Giant") into burying a huge casket of rocks, while the giant's body went to the anatomical table. He married well, a woman poet who kept salons; they lived in different worlds, and he designed a house that would accommodate society at the front and resurrection men at the back. (Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have based Jekyll and Hyde on the idea of this structure.) He was always eager to get to his research rooms instead of socializing, but an observer said of the course-talking Scot that he was not polished or refined, "but from originality of thought and earnestness of mind he was extremely agreeable in conversation." He loved keeping strange animals, and loved dissecting them when they died. He drove a cart pulled by three zebus, curly-horned Asian buffaloes, and alarmed his neighbors by using it as regular transportation. He may have been the inspiration for Doctor Dolittle. Wendy Moore has done a spectacular job of bringing him and his times to us. _The Knife Man_ has many gruesome patches that are hard to take, from descriptions of surgery without anesthesia, to experiments on hapless dogs, to the business of the cadaver trade. Its portrait of an extraordinary thinker, however, is vivid, compelling, and enormous fun.
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