ShareThisBy STANLEY M. ARONSON
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Most people believe that acquiring the bare necessities of life represents a major achievement. The struggle to survive too often leaves little remaining energy for other pursuits.
Limitless curiosity and wonderment principally remain behaviors of that small fraction of mankind whose station in life allows them the luxury of an inquiring mentality; and who, additionally, have the courage to doubt. And since sustained curiosity has few genuine advocates, it is often disparagingly relegated to the level of childish activity or the risky behavior of adolescent cats.
Sometimes, though, history provides us with an astonishing blessing, a human who devotes his adult life to the relentless search for answers to heretofore unanswered questions. Such a man was John Hunter (1728-1793), 10th offspring of a rural family from the Lanarkshire district of Scotland.
Hunter's youth, and specifically his schooling, were undistinguished. He left any semblance of formal education at age 15 to apprentice himself to a cabinetmaker in Glasgow. Failing at this, he sought employment with his older brother, William, who had already established himself as a teacher of anatomy and surgery in London.
Young Hunter journeyed to London in 1748 to work as his brother's assistant in dissecting parts of the human cadaver for use in the education of apprentice surgeons. Within a year, young Hunter had learned so much about the structural intricacies of the human body that he was now encouraged to teach others. Simultaneously he enrolled as a student of surgery at St. Bartholomew's Hospital.
Hunter now learned the hard lesson that humans are allotted but 24 hours in each day. Accordingly, he scheduled his days with great care, assigning at least six hours each night to his new enthusiasm: inquiries into the mysteries of nature. And except for a few years as a military surgeon in the British armies, he devoted the remainder of his life to his essentially self-taught profession (surgery), his core vocation (biological and botanical research) and his avocation (the building of a museum of biological objects of educational merit).
In 1755, he enrolled at Oxford. He lasted but two months, finding that formal education required memorization of vast amounts of literature written in dead languages while any creative analyses were dismissed as impertinences. He happily returned to his London quarters to refine his surgical skills and study the lessons that meticulous dissections offered to him. Hunter made arrangements with the various menageries in the London region to study the remains of animals. And from his vast experience in comparative vertebrate anatomy and embryology, he wrote paper after paper enlightening the scientific world on the intimate developmental and structural resemblances between the bony creatures.
By the time he was 45, his home had become a combination of modest living quarters and a small dispensary for his many surgical patients, with the bulk of the space devoted to his laboratories. His enclosures contained living fish, reptiles, birds, rodents and larger mammals.
Still further space contained insects from distant places sent to him by scientists who had learned of his work.
Hunter's research touched upon the relationship of blood flow to the capacity of body parts to grow. This led him to an extended study of the blood supply of the gravid uterus, how the placenta develops and how the maternal blood supply and the blood vessels of the fetus relate to each other.
Hunter's studies were incredibly far-reaching. He explored how bees found their way back to their hives, how caterpillars created silk, the circulation of essential fluids beneath the bark of deciduous trees, the nature of inflammation and the significance of pus, the treatment of gunshot wounds, regeneration of reptilian limbs, the nature and biological limitations of organ transplantation, the hereditary aspects of color-blindness, the relationship of plumage to sexual maturity in birds, the spread of smallpox to the fetus (Edward Jenner, discoverer of the principle of vaccination, was Hunter's favorite pupil), resuscitation of drowning victims, the study of fossil bones and their relationship to extant species, how teeth develop, how fishes communicate, the mammalian nature of whales, how certain fish develop electrical currents, hibernation in various species and how animals generate heat.
His ceaseless seeking was in the vain pursuit of those enigmatic forces that produce and sustain life. His later researches were concerned with blood, its regeneration and its life-giving purpose.
Hunter's avid, incautious curiosity led him to study the communicability of venereal diseases, then an urban scourge throughout Europe. Hunter, it is said, took some pus from a patient with syphilis and injected it into his thigh. After a short interval it produced an intense inflammation which he described in his 1786 Treatise on Venereal Disease.
Hunter's later years were filled with numerous honors, national and international. His surgical skills, though obscured by his many discoveries in what was then called natural philosophy, were considered exemplary. By 1776, he was considered to be the outstanding surgeon of the realm, and was appointed as surgeon extraordinary to King George III. Hunter's great personal museum is now a national treasure in London, supervised by the Royal College of Surgeons, and open to the public.
The power of sustained curiosity, like the baser visceral passions, may be formidable in some people. And rarely, it may be their most precious life-force. DeWolfe Howe wrote a brief poem about such people:
Now, thieving time, take what you must,
Quickness to hear, to move, to see,
When dust is drawing near to dust
Such diminutions needs must be.
Yet leave, O leave exempt from plunder,
My curiosity, my wonder.
Stanley M. Aronson, M.D., is dean of medicine emeritus, Brown University. His e-mail address is smamd(at)cox.net . For more stories visit scrippsnews.com
