uch a following. Among his favorite pupils may
be mentioned Haller, the physiologist, and van Swieten and de Haen, the
founders of the Vienna school.

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
systema