In Italy, too, there were men who caught the new spirit, and appreciated the value of combining morbid anatomy with clinical medicine.  Lancisi, one of the early students of disease of the heart, left an excellent monograph on the subject, and was the first to call special attention to the association of syphilis with cardio-vascular disease.  A younger contemporary of his at Rome, Baglivi, was unceasing in his call to the profession to return to Hippocratic methods, to stop reading philosophical theories and to give up what he calls the “fatal itch” to make systems.

The Leyden methods of instruction were carried far and wide throughout Europe; into Edinburgh by John Rutherford, who began to teach at the Royal Infirmary in 1747, and was followed by Whytt and by Cullen; into England by William Saunders of Guy’s Hospital.  Unfortunately the great majority of clinicians could not get away from the theoretical conceptions of disease, and Cullen’s theory of spasm and atony exercised a profound influence on practice, particularly in this country, where it had the warm advocacy of Benjamin Rush.  Even more widespread became the theories of a pupil of Cullen’s, John Brown, who regarded excitability as the fundamental property of all living creatures:  too much of this excitability produced what were known as sthenic maladies, too little, asthenic; on which principles practice was plain enough.  Few systems of medicine have ever stirred such bitter controversy, particularly on the Continent, and in Charles Creighton’s account of Brown(7) we read that as late as 1802 the University of Gottingen was so convulsed by controversies as to the merits of the Brunonian system that contending factions of students in enormous numbers, not unaided by the professors, met in combat in the streets on two consecutive days and had to be dispersed by a troop of Hanoverian horse.

     (7) Dictionary of National Biography, London, 1886, vii, 14-17.

But the man who combined the qualities of Vesalius, Harvey and Morgagni in an extraordinary personality was John Hunter.  He was, in the first place, a naturalist to whom pathological processes were only a small part of a stupendous whole, governed by law, which, however, could never be understood until the facts had been accumulated, tabulated and systematized.  By his example, by his prodigious industry, and by his suggestive experiments he led men again into the old paths of Aristotle, Galen and Harvey.  He made all thinking physicians naturalists, and he lent a dignity to the study of organic life, and re-established a close union between medicine and the natural sciences.  Both in Britain and Greater Britain, he laid the foundation of the great collections and museums, particularly those connected with the medical schools.  The Wistar-Horner and the Warren Museums in this country originated with men greatly influenced by Hunter.  He was, moreover, the intellectual father of that interesting group of men on this side of the Atlantic