William Hunter : physician, anatomist, founder of the Hunterian Museum ; The Hunterian Library / by John Young, M.D., Regius Professor of Natural History in the University of Glasgow and Keeper of the Hunterian Museum.

  • John Young
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: William Hunter : physician, anatomist, founder of the Hunterian Museum ; The Hunterian Library / by John Young, M.D., Regius Professor of Natural History in the University of Glasgow and Keeper of the Hunterian Museum. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    his own case—that the slight' point on which the t]fomplete- ness of the whole hung might be more difficulty might need a greater external stimulus^ than all the other preliminaries. No one suspects Huxley of a desire to depreciate Darwin, yet he wonders how no one had hit the critical point of the theory which revolutionised science. ' But Huxley lived through the pre-Darwinian into post-Darwinian days, knew how the final achievement had been reached, above all knew the change, the gain. Next century may find those who have not had this advantage filled with wonder that aught so obvious had escaped so many keen interested thinkers: more likely is this if these, themselves con- tributors to the advancement of knowledge, shall be galled by the detraction of their contemporaries. William Hunter made the process of foetal development a special study—he hatched eggs, obtained embryos at all the stages possible, noted all the miscarriages, by abortion and otherwise, which yielded the faintest hint. His pre- parations were in their turn profitable to a recent member of this University, Dr. Allen Thomson, who is associated with the study' of Embryology in the 19th century as an early contributor by the article, “ Ovum,” in Todd’s Cyclopaedia. Hunter early made a study of the anatomy of the Gravid Uterus, began the task 1751, and in 1775 published the work on which rests his greatest claim to the gratitude of succeeding generations. He demonstrated that the circulation on which the embryo depends for nourishment is duplicate, the maternal and foetal streams being ever apart, and that the tales of maternal death by hemorrhage from the cord were, in his emphatic language, lies. But he did more; by demonstrating the nature and anatomy of the foetal appendages he removed the process of reproduction from a morbid to tbe category of normal func- tions. He saw in the membrane lining the gravid uterus the equivalent of that which was normally present at the catamenial periods. It was no exudation of lymph, no suggestion of an inflammatory therefore abnormal product.