HUNTER, John

A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-shot Wounds to Which is Prefixed a Short Account of the Author's Life, by his Brother-in-Law Everard Home

London Printed by John Richardson 1794, lxvii, 575 p. 28 cm. 9 plates. Disintegrating pub. board. Binding poor, lacks rear board + spine and port. Some dampstaining. Hunter's ‘Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gunshot Wounds’ is his most important work; it is a compound of physiology, pathology, and surgery, and, while defective in regarding the red corpuscles as the least important part of the blood, is full of original observations and remarks. His account of inflammation necessarily loses value, since modern observations have revealed its nature, but it marked a great advance in knowledge, and for many years it stimulated the progress of surgery, and some of his views have been in recent times found to be truer than others which supplanted them. His most notable surgical advance was in the tying of the artery above the seat of disease in aneurysm. But the general influence of his teaching and method of study was even more important. Sir James Paget and many others term him ‘the founder of scientific surgery,’ as having first studied and directed attention to the processes of disease and repair on which the practice of surgery is based, and having brought to this study a large knowledge of physiology. He was a cautious rather than a brilliant operator, and never used the knife when he could avoid it, holding that ‘to perform an operation is to mutilate a patient we cannot cure, and so an acknowledgment of the imperfection of our art.’ DNB.

• USD 1,500.00 > other currencies
• ordernr.: 001304

• bookseller: Attic Books (CANADA)