The Hunterian oration delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England on the fourteenth day of February 1863 / by George Gulliver.

  • Gulliver, George, 1804-1882.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Hunterian oration delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England on the fourteenth day of February 1863 / by George Gulliver. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    answer the pm-poses of nutrition and vivification, and that the thymus is necessary to perform an office in the early part of life depending upon respiration * ; none of those eminent men or theii' disciples cared for his proofs that this gland is an append- age to the lymphatic system for the formation of central particles or nuclei when these are most needed for sanguification. Much less could they understand or realize his equally new and beautiful exposition of the development, structure, and diosmotic force of a cell. Here he was a lone star in a dark firmament. And ha^ang been thus, as far as regards the limited circle of his reseai'ches, a man above his age, he for that very reason requii'es to be judged in the light of a later generation. But it is pleasant to note that there was at least one exception to that dreary neglect, one physiologist who had immediately followed those researches, and frequently repeated all the experiments since Mr. Hewson's death. It was the ingenuous youth Magnus Falconer who thus saw and believed the wonders he had been taught by his master and brother-in-law, and paid such a noble respect to his memory in the publication of the last part of his ' Experimental Inquiries.' Aiid yet Mr. Himter, sixteen years after the appearance of that volume, not only discredited some of the best observations therein on the red coi^^uscles, but declai'ed that the circumstance of the red part of the blood having form probably led anatomists to pay more attention to it than it de- serves, as if they could thence explain any essential principle in the blood or animal economy!. Nevertheless there was Hewson, at least twenty years before the death of Himter, not only correcting the injurious en-ore of Leeuwenhoek and his school, and propoimding or establishing instead great truths about the blood-corpuscles, but fairly entering that prolific field of cells and endosmosis which was left utterly forgotten and barren for upwards of half a century afterwards, imtil new minds, with the aid of better instrimients, foimd in it such a variety of rich fruits, and confirmed so many of his long- neglected conclusions, as to reap the harvest of his labours. Hewson's observations on the lymphatic glands, th}Tnus, and spleen are so valuable that they still form the best foundation for future research concerning the recondite office of those organs, as well as part and parcel of some of the most recent tenets of our day, and a depository of facts and theories which, it not better known on the Continent than here, have certainly been translated thence into our own language, and patronized by his own coimtrymen as recent and original foreign discoveries —an this, too, not only ^vithout any honest mention of his name, but with that contempt for the just claims of Hewson and * Hewson's Works, Syd. Soc. ed., pp. 282, 263. t Hunter's Works, edited by Palmer, iii. 59.