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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    6 of healtliy blood scattered, and tlien collected into tlie well-known rolls with small interspaces of liquor sanguinis, and finally such rolls in buify blood further attracted together laterally into clumps, with larger interspaces of that fluid, so as to produce the mottled appearance and spots of red observed by Hunter, and this by that very increased disposition of the blood to separate into its component parts to which he so truly attributed the phenomenon*. . „ , Nevertheless, while thus careful that his originality be not unfaiiiy ignored, we should be equally solicitous not to attribute to him the merit of discoveries to which he has no just claim—a caution the more needful, as such mistakes have been too often committed, of which an example is afforded by the assertion that it was not known till he demonstrated it upon what part of the blood its spontaneous coagulation depends, which eiToneous statement, by the then Hunterian Professor, still stands, never yet con-ected by its author, in the preface to the 4th volume of the last edition of Hunter's Works. Hunter's genius needs no meretricious tribute. We have been taught by a great poet to look thi'ough nature up to nature's Grod; and may we not in a like spirit of reverence regard her prophets ? We should ever remember that it was Hunter's river that fertilized the physiological fields of Europe, comparatively barren before : O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme ! t It would, however, be a very hopeless task to attempt, in the single hoiu' allowed for this Oration, anything like a satisfactory view of Mr. Hunter's labom'S, although it seems to me that this might be done in a number of successive orations, especially when the subject has received so much elucidation fi*om my pre- decessors. To this end, we have only to choose some remarkable truth on which the genius of Hunter shone, to note the state of existing knowledge just before he found that truth, and finally to smwey it by the lights of modern science. This is the course I propose for the present occasion; and, far from feeling any want of matter, it so abundantlj^ crowds before the mind that the chief difficulty is one of selection. While our science lasts, no time can fade, nothing stale the infinite variety and value of Hunter's works, provided proper care be taken of them. But this involves a great amount of labour and expense, which must accrue vdth. the groT\i;h of the Museum, and which yom- Council has met and is prepared still to meet, if not always most judiciously, certainly with becoming zeal and liberality, sparing neither pains nor cost in pursuit of this primary object, and it is to be hoped, with a due sense of * Mr. Hunter's Works, ed. ty Palmer, i. 235, 381. t Sir John Denham.