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

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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

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T0 REID HUNT IN TOKEN OF OUR DEEP REGARD

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training under Newell Martin, in whose school so many American leaders were trained. From johns Hopkins, Hunt went to Germany to begin his pharmacological training Linder Binz. Returning, he took his Ph.D. under Howell in 1896 and at the same time obtained an M.D. from the University of Maryland. Apparently his deter- mination to devote himself to the application of chemical methods to biological problems was already thoroughly formulated by this time, for he spent the following summer with 'jacques Loeb and Stieglitz at Chicago, one of a group which though not yet recognized ewas to become among the most distinguished in America. His first purely pharmacological work, done at this time, was an investigation of poison- ous plants which had caused the death of cattle in the west. It was directly after this that he joined the expedition SCIII by the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York to the regions of the upper Nile to study Polipteizzr, the ancestor of all fish. At Wady Halfa, one of his companions-Harrington-sickened of fever and died. Both Hunt himself and Saunders contracted the fever, Hunt lightly, but Saunders seriously, and it was only by the energy and courage of the former that Saunders was trans- ported to safety. After the Sudan expedition and a brief residence in the United States, there fol- lowed for Hunt the two years of training which permanently influenced his work and fixed his interests. The years 1902 to 1904 he spent with Ehrlich in Frankfurt, taking part in the first brilliant introduction of chemical methods and thinking into the new science of immunity. Ehrlich himself, primarily an organic chemist, was interested at this time in the relationship of the structure of organic compounds to physiological action. Under this influence, Hunt began his important studies on quinine. Ehrlich was undoubtedly one of the great figures of his age. His great learning, combined with a quaint, somewhat crotchety but essentially humorous and warm- hearted nature, seemed to create a school in which community of intellectual interests was combined with strong personal affections and loyalties. An atmosphere pervaded the Frankfurt Institute during this time in which the enthusiastic and friendly young investigator felt at home and happy. He still speaks of those days in such a manner as to make us all wonder why we fail in our present laboratories to find a similar formula. At any rate, Hunt came back from Frankfurt fully moulded in the character and interests which guided the rest of his life. Soon after his return, began his service at the Hygienic Laboratory of the United States Public Health Service in Washington. Here, during the interval between 1905 and his coming to Harvard in 1915, he did much of the work on which his permanent reputation as a distinguished pharmacologist rests. His earlier investigations on the cholines resulted in the discovery of the action of acetylcholine on blood pressure. There followed methods of standardization of thyroid substances, the demonstration of thyroid hormone in human blood and his fundamental studies on the physiological action of methyl alcohol. His studies on the toxicity of the arsphenamine prepara- tions carried on during recent years have rendered invaluable service toward the safe and effective use of these important therapeutic agents.