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Torpedoes & Trout. A lone wolf who scorned his fellow doctors, Hunter was perhaps too far ahead of his time to leave any single medical monument. He presented more than 50 papers to the Royal Society on everything from torpedoes to the hearing of trout, but only a handful of his findings—an analysis of the lym phatic vessels, his pathology of gunshot wounds—were used by others while he lived. Yet a century before Darwin's voy age, he pondered the mystery of natural selection; 50 years before Sir Charles Lyell, he dabbled in scientific geology.
"When we make a discovery in pathology," wrote one authority in 1818, "we only learn what we have overlooked in his writings or forgotten in his lectures." Ironically enough, what may have been Hunter's proudest experiment proved a deadly failure. In 1767, when the distinction between venereal diseases was still unclear, he infected himself with pus from a patient who had both gonorrhea and (unknown to Hunter) syphilis. The gonorrhea was cured; the untreated syphilis, Kobler suggests, probably killed him. But from Hunter's viewpoint, the tragedy was deeper: by concluding in his clas sic Treatise on the Venereal Disease that the infections were the same, he helped set back knowledge of venereal disease for a generation.