The cutting edge of medicine

In 1767, John Hunter, a 39-year-old surgeon, performed an experiment on venereal disease. In order to prove the hypothesis that gonorrhoea was the same disease as syphilis, he dipped a lancet into a festering venereal sore, and then injected it into a penis. He took careful notes, observing the classic symptoms of gonorrhoea, which then developed into the secondary stage of syphilis. Buboes, ulcers and copper-coloured blotches appeared, which he anointed with mercury. This seemingly proved that syphilis and gonorrhoea were one and the same. But his experiment was fatally flawed. Unwittingly, he had injected from a patient with syphilis, not gonorrhoea. His botched experiment set back the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases for many decades. Even worse, he had ruined his own health. For the penis he injected was almost certainly his own. His symptoms abated after a few months, but the tertiary syphilis infection remained dormant in his system, and it emerged to torment him.

This story is characteristic of John Hunter, who emerges from Wendy Moore’s biography as a larger-than-life mixture of foolhardy, mad child and maverick genius. Virtually uneducated, he was the tenth child of a poor Scottish farmer. But he was also a man of the Enlightenment, driven by unquenchable curiosity. He arrived in London aged 20 to work as assistant to his brother William Hunter, who had set up a private anatomy school in Covent Garden. A dedicated social climber, William had studied at Glasgow University and come south to make his fortune. As a member of the medical elite of physicians, William considered himself too grand to dirty his hands by dissecting bodies. Hence the need for brother John.