The Hunterian oration : delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, February 14th, 1887 / by William S. Savory.

  • Savory, W. S. (William Scovell)
Date:
[1887]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Hunterian oration : delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, February 14th, 1887 / by William S. Savory. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    we arc impressed, not so much by the actual advance he made in the art, as by the degree in which, through the character of his work, he raised surgery to the level of a science. I would almost venture to say that he effected more by the nature of the questions which he set than by the answers which he worked out. Surely his conception of surgery, of its possibilities in the future, of its relation to the sciences, of the plan—the only sure one—upon which it could be advanced, went very far beyond that of any surgeon before him—shall I say has gone far beyond that of most surgeons after him? But if he could thus estimate the task before him, what shall we say or think of Hunter as we watch him, with unexampled diligence and patience, pondering over the preface? Never turning a page of the great book of Nature, which he had set himself to read, until each sentence before him had been duly weighed, and all that he could learn from it had been secured. But this was not enough. He not only saw that surgery, to be soundly established, must rest upon pathology, but that the language of pathology required an interpreter ; that its problems could be solved only by the light of physiology. Where in any work before his—nay, where in any since— shall we find such a union of physiology and surgery? In the pages of Hunter, but there I think only, are they found, as they should be, literally woven into one. We study his chapters on the Blood, on Inflammation, and on Gunshot Wounds, and acknowledge that nowhere else are the principles of pathology so supported and illustrated by the facts and truths of physiology. Yes j as no one before him had given proof of so clear and ample a conception of the relation of surgery to natural science, so in no one since has it borne such fruit. Hunter not only saw more fully than anyone who preceded him the way in which the