"It is the duty of Criticism neither to depreciate, nor dignify by partial representations; but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover."

    Johnson.

In tracing the progress of science, it is difficult to assign to each individual his just share of merit. The evidence, always incomplete, seldom allows us to do more than to mark the more fortunate, to whom, as it were, the principal parts have been allotted. The exposition of truth generally implies a previous contest with error. This may, in one sense, be compared with military achievements. We hear of the skill and wisdom of the General and his associate Chiefs; but little is known of individual prowess, on the multiplication of which, after all, the result depends.

To one who conferred so many obligations on his country and on mankind as Abernethy, it is difficult to assign only his just share; and yet it is desirable that nothing be ascribed to him which is doubtful or disputable.

Antecedently to Abernethy\'s time, and contemporaneous with the date of Mr. Hunter\'s labours, surgery had, in the best hands, and as a mere practical art, arrived at a respectable position; still, in Abernethy\'s early day, barber-surgeons were not yet extinct; and, as he jocosely phrased it, he himself had "doffed his cap" to barber-surgeons. There is no doubt that some of them had arrived at a very useful knowledge. The celebrated Ambrose Paré was a French barber-surgeon. When Abernethy entered into life, the best representative of the regular surgery of that day was Mr. Pott, who was contemporary with the period328 of Mr. Hunter\'s labours. Mr. Pott was a good surgeon, an eloquent lecturer, a scholar, and a gentleman; and he gave some surgical lectures at St. Bartholomew\'s Hospital. We have perused two manuscript copies of these lectures, which are in the library of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society, and they contain many useful and judicious observations. There are ripples of a more humane and scientific surgery, and many parts that are suggestive of onward study. Pott had also the good sense to perceive the measured pretensions of his own time, and to predict advances on it, as great as that itself was on the surgery of his predecessors: but we do not perceive anything in Pott\'s lectures in the shape of a science. Extensive generalizations we are not thinking of; we have them yet to get; but we see nothing, in the true sense of the word, even axiomatic. There are no steps, no axioms, by which we can reach the platform of more general propositions. In some of his operations, the most elementary principles are either not perceived or neglected; and, although there are general recognitions of the state of the health influencing the so-called surgical maladies, there is no definite principle developed. It is a recognition scarcely more than that implied in the older surgical writers, when, if the surgical part of a case did not go on well, they recommended the calling in of a physician.

In this state of things, John Hunter began a beautifully simple, and, in its bearings on surgery, we may add, a new mode of inquiry. He saw that there was much in all animals that was common, and that there were analogies in the whole organic kingdom of nature; hence he sought to develop, by observation of the various processes in various animals, and their nearest analogies in vegetables also, the true relations of the phenomena observable in man. It was not that he did that which had never been attempted before, in the abstract, but that he undertook it with a new, a concentrated unity of purpose. He did not employ, as it were, a different instrument to collect the rays of light from surrounding nature; but he concentrated them into a focus on a different object—the nature and treatment of disease. His labours, though not permitted329 to endure for many years, interrupted by indisposition, and suddenly stopped by death, were abundantly fruitful; they enabled him to simplify much of surgery that was officious and hurtful, and to correct many errors. He first gave a reason for this or that proceeding, founded on actual observation of natural processes: thus, in healing of wounds, the natural and healthy were distinguished from unnatural and unhealthy processes, and so forth. But as Mr. Hunter\'s enlarged views taught him the the value of the relations observable throughout the whole animal creation, he contemplated parts of the body only as a step to the more successful observation of the whole. As before stated, he observed the phenomena exhibited by the various organs, both separately and in connection; traced them with elaborate circumspection, and concluded by justifying what Abernethy said, when he observed: "Hunter proved that the whole body sympathized with all its parts."

Now, many of the facts which Mr. Hunter remarked in the relations established between different parts of the body, were, in the strictest sense, axiomatic—that is, they were exemplifications of laws to which they were the necessary steps. Take one for example: that the part sympathetically affected by an impression primarily made on another part, appeared to be frequently more disturbed than the part with which it had appeared to sympathize. This we now know to be no exception, but rather the law; because the exceptions (as we contend82) are explicable; but that was not then perceived. Abernethy, however, made use of this so far as to impress the fact, that organs might be seriously disordered without there being apparently any symptoms referable to them.

Now, Abernethy might have continued to labour as Hunter did in collecting facts as the materials for axioms, or as elements for future and more extensive generalization; or he might have at once taken Mr. Hunter\'s views, so far as he had gone, and, working on them with his remarkable aptitude for perceiving the more salient and practicable relations of facts, have applied them330 at once to practical purposes; gleaning more facts as his extremely acute observation might have enabled him on the way. He pursued, perhaps, neither course exclusively; but the latter appeared to be the one he chiefly adopted; and, from the more immediate fruition it affords, no doubt it was best adapted to the existing exigencies of a practical profession.

John Hunter was a man of indefatigable industry, and exceedingly circumspect in his observance of facts. Abernethy was fagging too, but more impulsive and not so dogged; mere facts were mere bores to him; he panted for practical relations, and was most wonderfully quick in perceiving them. His vision was as penetrative as Hunter\'s had been circumspect and cautious. Hunter would have sifted all the useful things out of any heap, however heterogeneous; Abernethy would have looked through it, at once found the one jewel that it concealed, and left the rest for the next comer. They were both most perfectly honest and truthful, both careless of money, both enthusiastic in science—that is, both ardent in the pursuit of truth, with that kind of feeling which does not stop to examine the utilitarian relations of these pursuits; but which, carried on by a continually increasing impulse, takes the good for granted, and is impelled by the love of truth for its own sake.

But, interesting as it is to contemplate those requisitions which, as indispensable, are common to the successful investigators of science, it is yet more so to observe the distinctive characters of John Hunter and John Abernethy. The former, with many ideas to tell, and most of them new, had a difficulty in expressing himself. With more need than any man before him for additional facilities in this way, he had a restricted vocabulary. Again, in making use of it, his style was seldom easy, often obscure; so that things which, when thoroughly understood, had no feature more striking than their simplicity, were often made to appear difficult, and by many readers, no doubt, had often been left unexamined.

Abernethy, on the contrary, had a happy facility of expressing himself, and a power, rarely equalled, of singling out the difficult parts of a subject, and simplifying them down to the level of ordinary331 capacities. Hunter, though not without imagination, or humour even, had these qualities held in abeyance by the unceasing concentration of his intellectual faculty. As Abernethy used to say, "John Hunter was always thinking." Abernethy, on the contrary, had an active imagination; it always accompanied his intellect, like a young, joyous attendant, constantly lighting up the more sombre propositions of her grave companion with varieties of illustration. The most difficult proposition, directly Abernethy began to fashion it, had all its rough points taken off, and its essential features brought out clear and orderly to the plainest intellect. John Hunter, in laying down a series of facts having the most important influence in the formation of a medical science (take place when it may), was not able to keep people awake. Abernethy\'s treatment of the most dry and unimportant, kept his audience unceasingly interested. The obscurity of language in Hunter was happily replaced, not only by an unusual ease, but by a curiosa felicitas, in Abernethy. In sustained composition, Hunter was generally difficult, often obscure; Abernethy, if not faultless, always easy and unaffected. If his style failed sometimes in earnestness and vigour, it was always sincere; and whilst, though not deficient in eloquence, it asserted no special claim to that excellence, it was always pleasing and perspicuous.

Nothing could be further from the earnest and thinking John Hunter than anything dramatic. Abernethy had that happy variety of countenance and manner that can be conveyed by no other term. Hunter, without being slow, was cautious, circumspect: Abernethy, without being hasty, was rapid, penetrative, and impulsive. Never were two minds so admirably fitted for the heavy-armed pioneering in science, and the comparatively light-trooped intellect which was calculated to render the first clearing easily convertible to those practical necessities with which the science had to deal. Accordingly we find that Abernethy very soon extended Mr. Hunter\'s views, and applied them so powerfully, as at least to create the dawnings of a science. He showed that all processes in the economy—and of course, therefore, those of disease—are essentially nervous in their origin: that is to say, the nerves being the instruments through which our relations332 are established with surrounding nature (however much we may, in common language, speak of this or that feeling, this or that organ, or this or that part of the body), all impressions must still be made primarily on the sensitive or nervous system of that part; and this, of course, whether they imply consciousness, or be altogether independent of it; that disturbed nervous action was, as the case might be, either the forerunner—or the next link in the chain of causation (i. e. the proximate cause)—of the disease; and that therefore the relief of diseased or disordered actions, however attempted, consisted ultimately and essentially in the restoration of healthy nervous power, or adaptation.

This, then, is the first proposition. The next thing, and which necessarily follows, is, that in the prevention or cure of disease, the first object is the tranquillizing of nervous disorder.

Now, here there are many things to be regarded; for man is a moral as well as a physical being; and the circumstances by which he is surrounded, even the air he breathes, the moral and physical impressions to which he is subjected, are very often not under his own control, much less that of his medical attendant. On the other hand, the food is, in civilized communities, very much under the influence of his volition; and there are many circumstances which, instead of impeding those adaptations which disorder requires, renders them particularly easy—it frequently happening that those things which are really best, are most easily procured. This is important; because the next proposition is, that the nervous system is very easily and constantly disturbed by disorder of one or other, or of the whole of the digestive organs, and that therefore the tranquillizing of disturbance in them is of the highest consequence in the treatment of disease: few propositions in any science are more susceptible of proof than the foregoing. But if this be so, we must now recollect the full force of what we have observed with regard to relation; that is, we must not restrict our notion of it to the general loose assent that there is a relation in all parts of the body, and rest on the simple admission, for example, that animals are formed in adaptation to their habits; but we must sustain the Cuvier-like impression of the fact, the Owen-like application of it to the phenomena; recollect333 that preconceived ideas of magnitude and minuteness can do nothing but obscure or mislead; and that the relations established in the body are constant and universal, however they may at first—as in the case we have quoted—excite the surprise or the derision of the less informed and less reflecting. We must take their immensely potential power as existing as certainly in the most trifling headache, as in the most malignant fever—in the smallest scratch, as in the most complicated compound fracture. We have plenty of facts now to prove this; but the first plain, clear enunciation of it all, the successful demonstra............