356 ON THE PROGRESS OF ANATOMY. 



having given the recent great impulse to all the three depart- 

 ments of our profession — pathological medicine through his 

 nephew Baillie, surgery through his brother John, and obste- 

 trics by his own individual efforts. Neither can John Hun- 

 ter — a man who was considered by most of his professional 

 brethren as a dreaming physiologist and a theorising surgeon — 

 be looked upon as the type of this second epoch now under 

 consideration. He was brought up in the dissecting-room, at 

 the time when descriptive anatomy was chiefly studied. He 

 was also an experimental physiologist throughout his whole 

 career. But putting out of view his surgical works, his writ- 

 ings during his lifetime did not so much promote the advance 

 of anatomy as of physiology, and great as they were, do not, 

 considered merely in the period when they appeared, occupy 

 so prominent a position as those of Haller. But to us at the 

 present day, who can read them through the knowledge which 

 his own labours have promoted, they possess a far deeper 

 meaning than could be appreciated at the time. We can now 

 perceive traces in all his writings of the great work he was 

 silently engaged in, a work understood at the time only by a 

 very few, and now brought to light through the invaluable 

 exertions of Mr. Clift and Professor Owen, under the influence 

 of the College of Surgeons in London. 



It has been proved that he had made and noted down, in 

 propositions of extraordinary beauty, not the anatomy of man 

 alone, but that of the whole organic world, arranged so as to 

 exhibit a knowledge far beyond what was dreamt of by any 

 of his contemporaries. 



I have already pointed out to you how the accurate 

 anatomy of Winslow, Cheselden, and the first Monro, reacted 

 on the art of surgery, and it is interesting to observe a corre- 

 sponding reaction in the physiological tendency of the latter 

 half of the century. In Edinburgh the era of the two Monros 

 and Whvtt was also the era of Cullen and Brown, and their 



