A Great Quaker Surgeon
Jonathan Hutchinson. By Herbert Hutchinson. (Heinemann. 12s. 6d.) TEC.HNICALLY, although it has obviously been a labour of love, this is almost everything that a biography should not be. It is over- loaded with details and pedigrees that are really not germane to the subject and detract from the portrait • and there is an almost total disregard of chronology. Thus in Chapter XI we are given material covering the years from 1878 to 1891. In chapter XII we are back to 1872. Chapter XIII ends in 1877. But in chapter XIV we are back again in 1872 and carried on to 190$, to be returned in chapter XV to 1878. This almost inevitably leads to repetitions as when, on page 220, we are given the exact words of a tribute paid by Sir Frederick Treves which we had already read on page 77. But if the book is without form, it is by no mean void. Jonathan Hutchinson was too outstanding a man in his own generation and too great a legend in those which followed for that to be possible ; and from the letters here given and the biographical text much of his mental stature and more of his essential goodness emerges. He was born in 1828, one of the twelve children of a prosperous Quaker merchant of Selby, in Yorkshire, a man of farming stock, upright and generous but, in his observances' a Quaker of the strictest sort. Jonathan was educated at home and at a local school and appren- ticed to a doctor in York at the age of seventeen. While there he was already beginning—though he was always to remain ardently loyal to the basic Quaker principles—to question some of its customs. The fact that he was ignominiously turned out of York Minster for keeping his hat on no doubt played a part in this. At the age of twenty-two he entered Bart's, where he was greatly influenced by James Paget, and he qualified as a doctor in the same year. During the Crimean War he wanted to serve in a military hospital near the field of action, but, in deference to his father's strong protests, he abstained. For the next few years, helping to support himself by medical journalism, he held appointments at Moorfields and Bart's, and in 1859, at the age of 3r—he had married a Quaker girl three years before—he became an assistant surgeon at the London Hospital.
The young couple set up house in Finsbury Circus, then a recognised consultants' quarter, and amongst the student boarders they took in was Hughlings Jackson, one of the fathers of modern neurology. Their own family was later to increase to ten children, and in 1874, having already bought a small country house and farm near Haslemere, they migrated to Cavendish Square, which was to be their home for thirty-two years and the scene of lavish hospitality. Meanwhile, Jonathan was rapidly becoming known as a man of almost omnivorous interests and authoritative knowledge. Although much of his work was done before the advent of modern bacteriology, many of his clinical observations—especially on congenital and acquired syphilis—have stood the test of time and become classics. He welcomed the theory of evolution as in accordance with the religious views to which he was slowly being driven ; and although he re- mained essentially a Quaker, he was a Quaker who shot, who believed that beer and wine were good for men (though not for women), and that the Divine Being had manifested Himself in Buddha and Zoroaster as well as in Christ. These views, which he occasion,ally expounded in public, were assailed not only by Anglicans and Noll-- conformists, but also in sorrow by the Society of Friends, including his own wife. None of his critics, however, ever doubted his OWE personal goodness and complete integrity. Socially he was ahead of his time in advocating a good State-provided middle-day meal in all elementary schools and if he was rather reluctant in accepting
the work of his fellow-Quaker Lister, he afterwards gave it his full acknowledgment.
In his later years—he received the F.R.S. in 1882—he devoted much of his time to the founding of local museums, in which he himself lectured from time to time upon subjects as diverse as the human skeleton and Diirer, geolog.cal time and Milton, the elephant's skull and Keats. He had his foibles, which included a deep distrust of stocks and shares, and led him to invest most of his surplus income in land and houses, and he obstinately maintained that the cause of leprosy was badly cured fish. But his mind remained receptive to the end, and he lived to be nearly eighty-five ; he contained an ever- bubbling well of drollery, and, if there were giants in those days, Jonathan Hutchinson was certainly one of them. For the sake of the man himself, as well as the large number of his letters that it
contains, this is certainly a book to be read. H. H. BASHFORD.
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