Harvard School of Medicine - Aesculapiad Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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T0 REID HUNT IN TOKEN OF OUR DEEP REGARD

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From az dry point by Arthur Willia 72 Heintqelman

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REID HUNT By HANs ZINSSER, M.D. HEN I drive up to the Medical School through the Fenway on winter mornings, I often pass Reid Hunt striding along in all kinds of weather, his head bent forward in a thoughtful attitude and his little satchel-crammed with books-swing- ing in his hand. I think with regret, at such times, of the unfortunate circumstances which, in modern teaching of large classes with rigid curricula, prevent that close personal association between teacher and student which, in many cases, might repre- sent the best that an educational institution could offer. I think also, as I watch him, of Reid Hunt the young man, starting one moon- light night many years ago to march with this same erect stride across the desert of the Sudan behind an escort of military convicts to carry his sick friend Saunders to care and safety. I see him then with eyes through which I wish his students could see him when he stands before them in the pit of the lecture hall. They would think of him, then, not only as the eminent scholar, shy beyond all display of learning, but also as the human being to whom his science has been a great adventure for the exercise of that courage and devotion which carried him and his friend safely through Kitchen- er's Sudan in 1898. We who are a little younger, and the much younger ones who are dedicating this book, are the beneficiaries of the enterprise and intelligence of men like Hunt. If medical biology is today rapidly advancing from pure empiricism in the direction of exact science, this is entirely to the credit of the men of the intellectual generation to which Dr. Hunt belongs, men who subjected themselves to the rigid disciplines of the fundamental sciences without thereby losing their interest in biological problems. The change from the old Huxleyan biology should have come much sooner, for ever since the last half of the Nineteenth Century, when examples like those of Claude Bernard, Pasteur and the rising German school of biochemists demonstrated the vital importance of chemical and physical training for biological research, the course along which progress must inevitably proceed had been marked out. But apart from a few individual pioneers here and there, it was not until 1900 and just before, that this new spirit was carried to American preclinical departments by the group of men like Abel, Chittenden, Christian Herter, Folin, Hunt and their fellows. Reid Hunt was born in 1870, in Martinsville, Ohio. After graduation from the University at Athens, Ohio, he went to Johns Hopkins and obtained his first technical