William Hunter, Surgeon
Roy Porter on a Scottish doctor who became the fashionable surgeon of choice in 18th century London.
Because medicine was so primitive, well might we feel that being ill a couple of centuries ago would have been a nightmarish torture – indeed one recent medical historian has called the period 'the age of agony'. After all, these were the days before the eminence of the great Victorian teaching hospitals, before the Nightingale revolution in nursing, before the coming of anaesthetics and antiseptics, which together made deep and lengthy surgery bearable and successful for the first time. Eighteenth-century hospitals still carry the stigma of being 'gateways to death', more lethal than the disease they treated. And we are only too familiar with the satirical images of the Georgian doctor created by writers such as Pope and cartoonists such as Hogarth: either fusty, dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists, swearing The Academicians of the Royal Academy, by Johan Zoffany, 1772. Hunter, chin in hand, stands beside Reynolds, with the ear trumpet blindly by Hippocrates and Galen, or disreputable quacks and charlatans. The jingle about one of London's most famous late-eighteenth-century physicians, John Lettsom, sums up this view rather well:
To continue reading this article you need to purchase a subscription, available from only £5.
Start my trial subscription now
If you have already purchased access, or are a print & archive subscriber, please ensure you are logged in.
Please email digital@historytoday.com if you have any problems.
