The Surgeon Who Tried the Experiment

John Hunter left school at thirteen, never earned a medical degree, and became the most important surgeon in British history. He dissected over two thousand bodies. He was named surgeon to King George III. He transformed surgery from a barber's trade into a science. His most famous advice, given to his student Edward Jenner — who would go on to develop the smallpox vaccine — was simple: "But why think? Why not try the experiment?"

Hunter took this personally.

He kept leopards, jackals, ostriches, and a zebra at his estate in Earl's Court. When two leopards once escaped and attacked his dogs, he seized both animals barehanded and dragged them back to their cages. He was, by his own admission, much agitated afterward. He performed the first recorded artificial insemination. He built a personal museum of nearly fourteen thousand specimens. And in 1767, he inoculated himself with discharge from a patient he believed had gonorrhea, to test whether it was the same disease as syphilis.

It was not. But his patient had both. Hunter developed symptoms of both diseases, concluded they were one and the same, and published his findings with the full weight of his authority.

It took Philippe Ricord fifty-one years and twenty-five hundred patients to prove him wrong.

The father of scientific surgery's most celebrated experiment was a single-subject trial with a contaminated sample. And his reputation was so enormous that nobody thought to try it again.