Volume 1

Catalogue of the anatomical and pathological preparations of Dr. William Hunter : in the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow / catalogue prepared by John H. Teacher.

  • Hunterian Museum (University of Glasgow). Library.
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Catalogue of the anatomical and pathological preparations of Dr. William Hunter : in the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow / catalogue prepared by John H. Teacher. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    60/486 (page 54)
    supplant tlie correct views of William Hunter. How the}^ also came to be attributed to the latter is a cruel instance of the irony of circumstances. At his death the carefully corrected MS. of the Anatomical Description of the Human Gravid Uterus, now preserved in the Hunterian Museum, passed, still incomplete, into the hands of Matthew Baillie. The description of the decidua and placenta in the earliest stages of pregnane}', and the manner in which the ovum becomes implanted in the uterus, presented difficulties to William Hunter, many of which still present themselves to us; and at the point where these subjects were to be taken up his MS. stops. His observations at the time he wrote went back no earlier than the third month for the gravid uterus in the dead body, and the sixth week in miscarriages. He was therefore unable to describe how and when the decidua was formed, and how the ovum becomes enclosed in the decidua reflexa. “ We cannot get women and open them—one at two days and another at six days after they were pregnant to examine.”^ As to the nature and anatomical arrange- ments of the decidua he had no difficulty; Plate XXXIV. of his great work is plainness itself on these points. The lectures of 1775 agree with what appears in the atlas of 1774, and with his own parts of the MS.; also, it is plain from the MS. catalogue of his collection, and from his latest writing—The Introductory Lectures to his last course of lectures”—that he never changed the opinion expressed in his earlier works that it was the uterine mucous membrane modified to meet the peculiar conditions of pregnancy. “ The gravid uterus,” he says, “ is a subject likewise, which has afforded me opportunities of making considerable improvements ; particularly one very important discovery; viz. that the internal membrane of the uterus, which I have named decidua, constitutes the exterior part of the secundines, or after-birth ; and separates from the rest of the uterus every time that a woman either bears a child or suffers a miscarriage. This discovery includes another, to wit, that the ])lacenta is partly made up of an excrescence from the uterus itself. These discoveries are of the utmost consequence, both in the physiological question about the connection between the mother and child ; and likewise in explaining the phenomena of births and abortions, as well as in regulating our practice.”- ’ Lee Ah res'. MS., R.C.S., Eng., 42, c. 31, p. 69. Introd. Lectii., p. 61. All the principal passages from the authentic works, and the clearest one from the lectures are quoted in the present Cafaloijue of the Anatomicat and PathologicaJ Preparations of Dr. William Hunter, Series 4S.