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In John Hunters classroom, students fearlessly tackle ...)
In John Hunters classroom, students fearlessly tackle global problems and discover surprising solutions by playing his groundbreaking World Peace Game. These kidsfrom high school all the way down to fourth grade, in schools both well funded and underresourcedtake on the roles of politicians, tribal leaders, diplomats, bankers, and military commanders. Through battles and negotiations, standoffs and summits, they strive to resolve dozens of complex, seemingly intractable real-world challenges, from nuclear proliferation to tribal warfare, financial collapse to climate change.
In World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements, Hunter shares the wisdom hes gleaned from over thirty years teaching the World Peace Game. Here he reveals the principles of successful collaboration that people of any age can apply anywhere. His students show us how to break through confusion, bounce back from failure, put our knowledge to use, and fulfill our potential. Hunter offers not only a forward-thinking report from the front lines of American education, but also a generous blueprint for a world that bends toward cooperation rather than conflict. In this deeply hopeful book, a visionary educator shows us what the future can be.
John Hunter was a Scottish surgeon, one of the most distinguished scientists and surgeons of his day.
Background
Hunter was born on 13 February, 1728 at Calderwood, the youngest of ten children. His father, who died on the 30th of October 1741, 2 aged 78, was descended from the old Ayrshire family of Hunter of Hunterston, and his mother was the daughter of a Mr Paul, treasurer of Glasgow.
Hunter's mother died on the 3rd of November 1751, aged 66.
Education
Hunter studied under William Cheselden at Chelsea Hospital and Percival Pott at St. Bartholomew's Hospital.
Hunter also studied with Marie Marguerite Bihéron, a famous anatomist and wax modeler teaching in London; some of the illustrations in his text were likely hers.
Hard-working, and singularly patient and skilful in dissection, Hunter had by his second winter in London acquired sufficient anatomical knowledge to be entrusted with the charge of his brother's practical class.
Career
When nearly 21 he visited William in London, where his brother had become an admired teacher of anatomy.
John started as his assistant in dissections (1748), and was soon running the practical classes on his own.
In 1754 he became a surgeon's pupil at St George's Hospital, where he was appointed house-surgeon in 1756.
It has recently been alleged that Hunter's brother William, and his brother's former tutor William Smellie, were responsible for the deaths of many women whose corpses were used for their studies on pregnancy.
John is alleged to have been connected to these deaths, since at the time he was acting as William's assistant. However, persons who have studied life in Georgian London agree that the number of gravid women who died in London during the years of Hunter's and Smellie's work was not particularly high for that locality and time; the prevalence of pre-eclampsia, a common condition affecting ten percent of all pregnancies and one easily treated today, but for which there was no treatment in Hunter's time, would more than suffice to explain a mortality rate that seems suspiciously high to 21st-century readers.
During the period of his connexion with Dr Hunter's school he, in addition to other labours, solved the problem of the descent of the testis in the foetus, traced the ramifications of the nasal and olfactory nerves within the nose, experimentally tested the question whether veins could act as absorbents, studied the formation of pus and the nature of the placental circulation, and with his brother earned the chief merit of practically proving the function and importance of the lymphatics in the animal economy.
The Hunterian Oration, instituted in 1813 by Dr Matthew Baillie and Sir Everard Home, is delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons on the 14th of February, which Hunter used to give as the anniversary of his birth.
Hunter was commissioned as an Army surgeon in 1760 and was staff surgeon on expedition to the French island of Belle Île in 1761, then served in 1762 with the British Army.
Hunter left the Army in 1763, and spent at least five years working in partnership with James Spence, a well-known London dentist. Although not the first person to conduct tooth transplants between living people, he did advance the state of knowledge in this area by realising that the chances of a successful tooth transplant would be improved if the donor tooth was as fresh as possible and was matched for size with the recipient.
These principles are still used in the transplanation of internal organs.
Although donated teeth never properly bonded with the recipients' gums, one of Hunter's patients stated that he had three which lasted for six years, a remarkable period at the time.
Hunter set up his own anatomy school in London in 1764 and started in private surgical practice.
In 1765, Hunter bought a house near the Earl's Court district in London. The house had large grounds which were used to house a collection of animals including 'zebra, Asiatic buffaloes and mountain goats', as well as jackals. In the house itself, Hunter boiled down the skeletons of some of these animals as part of research on animal anatomy.
A newspaper article reported that many animals there were 'supposed to be hostile to each other but . . . in this new paradise, the greatest friendship prevails', and this image may have been the inspiration for the Doctor Dolittle literary character.
In 1767 he was considered the leading authority on venereal diseases, and believed that gonorrhea and syphilis were caused by a single pathogen. Living in an age when physicians frequently experimented on themselves, he was the subject of an often-repeated legend claiming that he had inoculated himself with gonorrhea, using a needle that was unknowingly contaminated with syphilis.
When he contracted both syphilis and gonorrhea, he claimed it proved his erroneous theory that they were the same underlying venereal disease
In 1770 he settled in Jermyn Street, in the house which his brother William had previously occupied; From 1772 till his death Hunter resided during autumn at a house built by him at Earl's Court, Brompton, where most of his biological researches were carried on. .
In The Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures, published in 1774, Hunter provides case histories for at least four of the subjects illustrated.
Hunter heavily researched blood while bloodletting patients with various diseases.
This helped him develop his theory that inflammation was a bodily response to disease, and was not itself pathological.
Hunter studied under William Cheselden at Chelsea Hospital and Percival Pott at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Hunter also studied with Marie Marguerite Bihéron, a famous anatomist and wax modeler teaching in London; some of the illustrations in his text were likely hers.
After qualifying he became Assistant Surgeon (house surgeon) at St George's Hospital (1756) and Surgeon (1768).
The experiment, reported in Hunter's A Treatise on the Venereal Diseases (part 6 section 2, 1786), does not indicate self-experimentation; this experiment was most likely performed on a third party.
Hunter championed treatment of gonorrhea and syphilis with mercury and cauterization. Because of Hunter’s reputation, knowledge concerning the true nature of gonorrhea and syphilis was set back, and it was not until 51 years later that his theory was proved to be wrong, by the French physician Philippe Ricord.
In 1783 Hunter moved to a large house in Leicester Square, where today there stands a statue to him. The space allowed him to arrange his collection of nearly 14, 000 preparations of over 500 species of plants and animals into a teaching museum. The same year, he acquired the skeleton of the 2. 31 m (7' 7") Irish giant Charles Byrne against Byrne's clear deathbed wishes—he had asked to be buried at sea.
The skeleton today, with much of Hunter's surviving collection, is in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.
In 1786 he was appointed deputy surgeon to the British Army and in March 1790 he was made Surgeon General by the then Prime Minister, William Pitt.
While in this post he instituted a reform of the system for appointment and promotion of army surgeons based on experience and merit, rather than the patronage-based system that had been in place.
Hunter's death in 1793 followed a heart attack during an argument at St George's Hospital over the admission of students.
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In John Hunters classroom, students fearlessly tackle ...)
Views
His interest in the organ of hearing, particularly in fish, resulted in a fine series of specimens of this intricate structure in the skate and the cod.
Contrary to prevailing medical opinion at the time, Hunter was against the practice of 'dilation' of gunshot wounds.
This practice involved the surgeon deliberately expanding a wound with the aim of making the gunpowder easier to remove.
Although sound in theory, in the unsanitary conditions of the time it increased the chance of infection, and Hunter's practice was not to perform dilation 'except when preparatory to something else' such as the removal of bone fragments.
Quotations:
In the buttery book for 1755 at St Mary's Hall his admission is thus noted: " Die Junii 5to 1755 Admissus est Johannes Hunter superioris ordinis Commen- was induced to enter as a gentleman commoner at St Mary's Hall, Oxford, but his instincts would not permit him, to use his own expression, " to stuff Latin and Greek at the university. "
Membership
Hunter was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767.
Later he became a member of the Company of Surgeons.
In 1787 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.
Personality
His nature was kindly and generous, though outwardly rude and repelling. .. . Later in life, for some private or personal reason, he picked a quarrel with the brother who had formed him and made a man of him, basing the dissension upon a quibble about priority unworthy of so great an investigator. Yet three years later, he lived to mourn this brother's death in tears.
He was described by one of his assistants late in his life as a man 'warm and impatient, readily provoked, and when irritated, not easily soothed'.
Quotes from others about the person
Hunter bribed a member of the funeral party (possibly for £500) and filled the coffin with rocks at an overnight stop, then subsequently published a scientific description of the anatomy and skeleton. "He is now, after having being stolen on the way to his funeral, " says Muinzer, "on display permanently as a sort of freak exhibit in the memorial museum to the person who screwed him over, effectively. "
Some three and thirty years later he thus significantly wrote of an opponent: "Jesse Foot accuses me of not understanding the dead languages; but I could teach him that on the dead body which he never knew in any language dead or living".
Connections
In 1771, he married Anne Home, daughter of Robert Boyne Home and sister of Sir Everard Home. They had four children, two of whom died before the age of five. One of his infant children is buried in the churchyard in Kirkheaton, Northumberland, and the gravestone is Grade II listed. Their fourth child, Agnes, married General Sir James Campbell of Inverneill.