THE GREAT MUSEUMS OF BRITAIN. 75 



His studies in comparative anatomy and physiology 

 were, however, by no means of purely abstract interest 

 to him, nor disconnected entirely from surgery and 

 medicine. On this point the ablest of his biographers* 

 has made the following apt remarks : * At the time he 

 [John Hunter] commenced his labours, surgery, though 

 holding a far more respectable station as a practical art 

 than it had done fifty years before, was yet destitute of 

 those sound general views of the nature and treatment of 

 disease, which constitute the foundation of practice in the 

 present day, and the possession of which justly entitles it 

 to claim the rank of a science. The able men who, in 

 this country and on the Continent, immediately preceded 

 Hunter, had succeeded, by the exercise of correct observa- 

 tion and sound judgment, in removing a load of absurd 

 practices with which the art had been clogged ; but the 

 improvements suggested by them depended for the most 

 part on isolated experience, and were deficient in a solid 

 and satisfactory foundation upon well-known principles of 

 the animal economy. As yet little had been done towards 

 explaining the real nature of diseases, by showing in what 

 particulars they are allied to natural processes, and what 

 are the aberrations from those processes which give them 

 their peculiar character. Nor were the actions by which 

 nature operates in the cure of diseases at all better under- 

 stood, and the most vague notions prevailed respecting 

 the important functions of nutrition and absorption, and 

 the processes of adhesion, suppuration, granulation, &c. ; 

 the right understanding of which forms as it were the very 

 corner-stone of a good surgical education at the present 



* Drewry Ottley. 



