Hardcover book (a) with gold and yellow paper book cover (b); inside cover with handwritten name and date; information divided into eight sections; includes index and bibliography; gold text on spine and cover; 359 pages including index.
Hardcover book (a) with gold and yellow paper book cover (b); inside cover with handwritten name and date; information divided into eight sections; includes index and bibliography; gold text on spine and cover; 359 pages including index.
Number Of Parts
2
Part Names
a - book
b - paper cover
Provenance
Belonged to owner's namesake, his uncle Dr. Charles Harold Bird.
On paper jacket: "The // Reluctant // Surgeon: // A Biography of // John Hunter, // medical genius // and great inquirer // of Johnson's England // John Kobler"; on frontispiece: "THE RELUCTANT // SURGEON // A BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN HUNTER // JOHN KOBLER // 1960 // DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. // GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK"; HANDWRITTEN INSIDE COVER: "HGodfrey Bird // Christmas 1960 // from Mrs. Wright - Helen"
Permanent Location
Storage Room 2005
2005-3
Length
a - 24.0 cm
b - 54.7 cm
Width
a - 15.8 cm
b - 24.0 cm
Depth
a - 4.0 cm
Unit Of Measure
centimeters
Dimension Notes
Book cover opened flat
Condition Remarks
Shows minor wear along edges with corners bent inwards; faded fabric on spine; all folds on paper cover split and covered with yellowing and brittle adhesive clear tape, many rips and minor losses along edges
Copy Type
original
Reference Comments
From book cover flap
Research Facts
Information on the book cover flaps:
John Hunter was a gruff, unlettered Scotsman whose supreme genius brought medicine out of the Dark Ages and earned him the title of “the founder of scientific surgery.” Practicing in eighteenth-century London, he combined a gift for observation with an astounding originality of thought to become a pioneer in countless fields of science. He has been described as “the most important naturalist between Aristotle and Darwin … the Shakespeare of medicine … one of the greatest men the English nation has produced.” He was a singular man, and John Kobler tells his singular story in this remarkable biography.
Hunter was generations ahead of his time. His work in surgery and urology has only been fully appreciated in recent decades. John and his brother William were the first to trace the lymphatic system. John devised an operation for aneurisms still used today. He performed the first human artificial insemination. A hundred years before Freud he grasped the psychic factors in disease. And in several respects he anticipated Darwin.
He was perhaps the greatest dissector and collector of anatomical specimens in history. This involved him in the murky art of body snatching, but won for his museum such oddities as the skeleton of a man eight-and-a-half-feet tall. As a teacher he had enormous influence, spurring Edward Jenner to his discovery of vaccination, and profoundly affecting the development of medicine and surgery in A,ercia through his students, including John Morgan, who established the first medical school here, and Philip Syng Physick, the “Father of American Surgery”.
John Kobler paints a vivid and unusual picture of the London of Johnson and Boswell. Boswell himself appears in these pages as on of Hunter’s patients, as does the infant Lord Byron (it was Hunter who prescribed the orthopedic shoe that allowed the boy Byron to walk), the painters Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, and Benjamin Franklin. Illustrious company, but none of whom overshadows John Hunter in long-range importance to humanity.
John Kobler is a Saturday Evening Post editor who has written innumerable articles for his own magazine, the The New Yorker, Life, the old Vanity Fair, and many other publications. His frequent writings on science and medicine have given him a grasp of these professional subjects extraordinary for a layman. A graduate of Williams College, Mr. Kobler has worked as a foreign correspondent and as an editor for Time and for Life. He married a Scottish girl during the war. They have two daughters and live in Wilton, Connecticut.