Henry Hun and his family: Three foundational stories in the history of nineteenth-century American neurology, Part I. Thomas Hun (1808–1896): Nineteenth-century patriarch, neurophilosopher, and proto-neurologist

ABSTRACT

Thomas Hun (1808–1896)—along with his sons Edward (1842–1880) and Henry (1854–1924)—were prime movers in establishing the clinical practice and academic discipline of neurology in the Hudson River Valley of New York in the ninteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This article outlines the life of the family’s semi-aristocratic patriarch, beginning with Thomas’s unusual educational background and his six-year post-graduate hiatus in Paris of the 1830s, where he came under the influence of P. C. A. Louis (1787–1872). It lays out his subsequent career as professor of the Institutes of Medicine and ultimately as dean of an American medical school that was not situated in a major metropolis. It also will demonstrate how Thomas Hun’s career as a medical practitioner, academician, neurophilosopher, and “proto-neurologist” recapitulates the evolution of clinical and academic neurology in nineteenth-century America.

KEYWORDS:

• Albany Medical College
• history of nineteenth-century American medical education
• history of nineteenth-century American neurology
• neurophilosophy
• Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis
• Thomas Hun
• vis medicatrix naturae

Acknowledgments

Gracious assistance from Jessica Watson, MSIS, Albany Medical Center/Albany Medical College Archivist, has been invaluable in assembling this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The DWIC established large privately held estates that were each headed by a “patroon” (patron or protector). The patroon was charged with recruiting a minimum of 50 adults to serve as tenant farmers on his patroonship. In return, he was obliged to provide the tenants with a clergyman and a schoolteacher. The largest and most prosperous patroonship was Rensselaerswijck, with vast acreage on both sides of the Hudson River in the region of Albany. After the fall of the Dutch New Netherlands colony, the British maintained the system, but rebranded the patroonships as colonial manors. The patroons, now called proprietors or manor lords in the new English system, oversaw and had limited judicial authority over a semifeudal system of lucrative tenant farms. As agent for the Rensselaer family, the manor lords of Rensselaerswijck, Thomas Johannes Hun was well able to afford a stately brick mansion in the upscale portion of the town. The manorial system in New York state persisted into the mid-nineteenth-century (Christoph 2005a, 2005b; Judd 2005).

² The headmaster at Albany Academy during Thomas’s 6sixyear course was Theodric Romeyn Beck, MD. In addition to being headmaster at the academy, Beck also taught chemistry at the school while simultaneously serving as professor of the Institutes of Medicine at the “College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District of the State of New York,” located in the hamlet of Fairfield, New York, “an insignificant village off the beaten trails” 80 miles northwest of Albany (Norwood [1944] 1971, 150–51). In 1823, while Thomas was a student at the academy, Beck published the first edition of his Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, the most popular textbook on the subject through the mid-nineteenth-century (Mohr 1993, 15–28). In 1840, following the closure of the Western District school, Beck would join his former student as one of the earliest faculty members at the newly formed Albany Medical College (Beebe 1983).

³ A “new secret society of a literary and social order,” Kappa Alpha was the “parent of the present vast system of American College fraternities” (Baird 1905, 150).

⁴ Over the ensuing 50 years, Hun continued to demonstrate deep personal admiration and professional respect for Williams and would deliver the official testimonial obituary for his mentor at the annual meeting of the New York State Medical Society in 1873 (T. Hun 1874).

⁵ Lectures on the Institutes (i.e., Basic Principles) of Medicine continued as a staple of medical education throughout much of the nineteenth century and were intended to cover the scientific underpinnings and pathophysiology of disease. Therapeutics was taught separately, primarily in Materia Medica and Surgery as well as at the bedside.

⁶ Even at the prestigious University of Pennsylvania in the 1820s and at most American medical schools well into the nineteenth century, students matriculating for a medical degree did not need prior college education. Indeed, there were no specified academic requirements for admission at most schools. Nothing beyond basic literacy was assumed, and on rare occasions even that bar was not met (Ludmerer 1985, 12). As a result, Hun and his classmates were warned that “general bad spelling in a thesis, or general inattention to the rules of grammar, preclude a candidate from examination for a degree” (University of Pennsylvania 1830, 24).

⁷ The battle over licensing of physicians and other professionals would continue for most of the nineteenth century. In 1844, a mere 17 years after adopting licensing requirements, New York State rescinded its medical licensing law. A combination of egalitarianism, basic distrust of medical therapies, and competing claims from alternative medical systems and philosophies led to similar reversals in every state by 1850. It would take another 30 years and a major shift in public sentiment for New York to reimpose licensing beginning in 1875. (Hudson 1972; Starr 1982, 58).

⁸ Prior to John Snow’s observation of the relationship between the water supply and a London cholera outbreak in 1854 and the still later acceptance of the germ theory of infection, cholera was generally felt to be caused by miasma or bad air. This miasmic theory of disease persisted throughout the nineteenth century. Ironically, Thomas’s son Henry would describe the presumed ill effects of bad air a half-century later in an article titled “Sewer-Gas Poisoning” (H. Hun 1887a).

⁹ In the same letter, Hun also expressed some biting humor aimed at what he saw as the parochial behavior of the British in Paris. Writing less than 20 years after the Treaty of Ghent had concluded the second war between Great Britain and her former American colony, Hun wondered if the presence of 60,000 English in Paris “threaten(s) to drive out the French, as the Yankees (descendants of English colonists) have elbowed us Dutch out of Albany. But the English do not stay (in Paris) a long time. They look around and satisfy themselves that the French have nothing equal to Roast beef and plum pudding and soon go home to enjoy those luxuries.”

¹⁰ Lawyer (1915–1986) would have been acquainted with details of the Hun family. Although his career as a neuroscientist and clinical neurologist was based in New York City, Lawyer was raised in Albany and attended Union College, where he was a member of Kappa Alpha, the fraternity Thomas Hun had cofounded there in 1825. In addition, Lawyer’s father, a prominent obstetrician-gynecologist, graduated from Albany Medical College in 1907 at a time when Henry Hun was a major force at the school and the memory of Thomas Hun would still have been fresh (Beebe 1983, 422). Tiffany Lawyer, Jr., was also a younger contemporary in the close-knit Albany medical community that included Henry Hand Hun (1893–1972), Henry’s son, who spent his career on the surgical faculty of the Medical College.

¹¹ Louis has also been characterized as a “preformal” epidemiologist as “he based his ‘recherches’ on epidemiology’s two principles: group comparison and population thinking” (Morabia 2006, 159).

¹² The father of Cuyler Reynolds, an early-twentieth-century genealogist-historian in the Albany, New York, region, was a half sibling to Lydia Louisa Reynolds, Thomas Hun’s wife (Reynolds 1911b, 1844–1846). Cuyler Reynolds’s son, Kenneth, would later marry his distant cousin, Lydia Marcia Hun, the daughter of Henry Hun and granddaughter of Thomas and Lydia Reynolds Hun.

¹³ Dr. Richard Beebe was an iconic figure at Albany Medical College for some 60 years in the mid- to late-twentieth century. In addition to writing the history of the first 143 years of the school in 1983, he served as Chairman of its Department of Medicine from 1948 to 1968. He also had a connection by marriage to both the Hun and Reynolds families. Beebe’s daughter Nancy married Kenneth Reynolds Jr, paternal grandson of Cuyler Reynolds and maternal grandson of Henry and Lydia Hun.

¹⁴ The term at virtually all medical schools in the highly agrarian United States began in the late fall and ran through the winter months, thereby allowing the students time to tend to planting and harvesting crops at the family farm. The colder weather during the school session also helped with preservation of cadavers for dissection.

¹⁵ In addition to natural science, natural philosophy, and chemistry, students at Union College in 1825 studied logic and metaphysics in their fourth or “philosophical” year (Somers 2003, 199). Epistemology, which “is the study of the nature of knowledge and justification” (Moser 2002, 3) would have been part of that classical curriculum.

¹⁶ As was the case with many of his fellow students who traveled to Paris in the 1830s for further medical studies, Hun returned to the United States an evangelistic proponent of French empiricist methodology (Warner 1998, 74). In this essay, however, he attacked a different type of “empiric medicine,” one that is highly skeptical of the role of organized scientific principles in guiding medical practice, relying instead on the individual practitioner’s personal trial-and-error or empiric experience. In this setting empiric equates with practical knowledge, as opposed to scientifically based knowledge which is perceived as visionary.

¹⁷ Several decades later, a new cadre of academic physicians trained in the laboratories of Vienna and Berlin, as exemplified by Thomas’s son Henry, would challenge and replace the Parisian trained academicians of Thomas Hun’s generation in American medical schools. The debate then would be over the issue of exactitude. The German model of medical science as an exact discipline, based on mathematical results gained in laboratory and animal experimentation, rapidly pushed aside the far less exact observational and numerical methods Thomas Hun and his colleagues had brought back from Paris in the 1820s and 1830s (Warner 1998, 335–336).

¹⁸ While to the modern reader the word “hygiene” evokes culturally determined standards of personal cleanliness such as clean fingernails and hair, the word had a far broader meaning in nineteenth-century medical parlance. To Thomas Hun, the term would have subsumed what would currently be labeled public health issues such as water and sewage control, nutrition, housing, and other societal issues.

¹⁹ Later in his career, Hun would address another cause for popular distrust of American physicians: their reliance on potentially dangerous “heroic treatments” such as bloodletting and purgation.

²⁰ Writing in 1911, her nephew, Cuyler Reynolds, described Lydia as “one whose mind had been enriched by a liberal education. … Her chief interest lay in planning to reform what was evil and to aid those oppressed by undue hardships.” Well before Jane Addams had established Hull House in Chicago in 1889, Lydia Hun had personally purchased and furnished a similar settlement house in Albany (Reynolds 1911a, 198).

²¹ Brunonianism’s most famous adherent in the United States and consequently a strong proponent of “heroic therapies” was Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), signer of the Declaration of Independence, Surgeon General of the Continental Army, and professor of the Institutes of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Rush died a decade before Thomas Hun’s arrival at the school in 1826.

²² The first person to actually hold that title at the Medical College was Meredith Clymer, who was appointed to the position in 1870, 12 years after Hun’s resignation.

²³ The origin of this saying is obscure. It has been mistakenly attributed to Aristotle, but the true author and date of composition are unknown.

²⁴ Two years after Hun’s talk, Claude Bernard would argue against this type of Vitalism in his Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (Normandin 2007). Hun did not mention Bernard’s previous writings on pancreatic secretions and hepatic glycogenesis but, given his fluency in French as well as his lifelong interest in Parisian medical scientific writings, he was likely aware of Bernard and his work. In 1876, Hun returned to Paris and made a point of attending one of Bernard’s lectures (T. Hun 1876).

²⁵ Thomas Hun served on the vestry of St. Peter’s Episcopal (Anglican) Church in Albany. In letters to Henry while the latter was studying in Germany from 1880 to 1883, on several occasions Thomas updated him with news of their mutual good friends and next-door neighbors, Episcopal Bishop William Croswell Doane and his wife, Sarah. Doane served as rector of Hun’s church prior to his election as the first bishop of the newly created Episcopal Diocese of Albany in 1869. Following its dedication by Bishop Doane in 1888, Hun transferred his membership to the Episcopal Cathedral of All Saints, where he served on its “Chapter” or governing board until his death in 1896.

²⁶ Once again foul air was judged to be a cause rather than a byproduct or accompaniment of disease.

²⁷ Hoffman did not reveal why he specifically appointed Hun to this investigative team. In another setting, however, Hoffman had described Thomas Hun as “my much respected and esteemed friend” (Mosher 1920, 577) . Hun’s name would also have been known in neuropsychiatric circles at the time, as earlier that year the Journal of Insanity had published a lengthy essay authored by Hun entitled, “Is Insanity a Disease of the Mind, or of the Body?” (T. Hun 1872).

²⁸ Thomas’s oldest son, Edward, was the neuropathologist at the New York State Asylum at Utica when the commission visited that institution as part of its fact-finding mission. In addition, another of his sons, Marcus Tullius Hun, served as Barlow’s Deputy Attorney General (Reynolds 1911a, 199). By today’s standards, these family entanglements would be viewed as potential conflicts of interest.

²⁹ The title for prior holders of this office had been “president” of the college and/or faculty (Beebe 1983, 393).

³⁰ Thomas Hun could be a long-winded speaker, and this address was no exception. Although it contained the traditional congratulations and inspirational exhortations seen in most commencement addresses up to the present day, the tone of the address was at times rather dour. In addition, nearly half of the talk was devoted to somewhat rambling attacks on homeopathy and other medical “systems,” issues that had rankled him for several decades at that point.

³¹ In addition to those three articles, early in his tenure at the college Hun was involved in a lengthy series of polite but somewhat acrimonious written “discussions” with Edward C. Delavan, a wealthy Albany businessman and leader of the New York State Temperance Society. Their correspondence was initially published in the periodical The Enquirer, Devoted to the Proper Use of Alcoholic Poisons. The lead-in to the dispute was the publication in 1841 of The Pathology of Drunkenness, or the Physical Effects of Alcoholic Drinks, with Drawings of the Drunkard’s Stomach. A Letter Addressed to Edward C. Delavan, Esq by Thomas Sewall MD. Hun objected to Sewall’s work on two counts. His main objection was to Sewall’s drawings that purported to show severe changes in the gastric lining of “drunkards.” Based most likely on knowledge acquired performing necropsies in Paris and Albany, Hun viewed Sewall’s drawings as at best erroneous if not an outright hoax. In addition, it comes as no surprise, given his social background and recent six-year sojourn in Paris, that Hun not only defended but strongly advocated for the beneficial effects of moderate alcohol consumption. The faculty voted to have Sewell’s book removed from the college library, triggering public admonishment of Hun by Delavan. The subsequent discussions between the two took place in The Enquirer over several months in 1843, and ultimately were published by the Temperance Society as a separate tract in 1845 (T. Hun and Delavan 1843).

³² Since Thomas Hun’s time, other prominent neurologists, neurosurgeons, and neuroscientists have weighed in on “traditional philosophical questions about the nature of the mind … such as the nature of knowledge and learning, decision-making and choice, as well as self-control and habits” (Churchland 2022).

³³ Gilbert Ryle, a mid-twentieth-century British philosopher, first coined “with deliberate abusiveness” the sarcastic ghost-in-the-machine description of Descartes’s body/mind dualism (Ryle 1949, 11–24). Although it is unlikely Ryle had any knowledge of Thomas Hun and his writings, Ryle’s philosophical arguments touched on, and argued strongly against, virtually all the points Hun attempted to make in this publication.

³⁴ In 2012, the offensive term “lunatic” was formally removed from the U.S. Federal (Legal) Code but, despite recommendations from the American Psychological Association, it is still embedded in state and local codes and legal documents. The equally offensive term “idiot” was allowed to remain (LaFortune 2018).

³⁵ Writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, Hun would have adamantly rejected being labeled a believer in humoral medicine. Nonetheless, he advocated the use of a purgative to increase bile flow in a melancholic patient, as “the mental disturbance depended on the circulation through the brain of blood imperfectly depurated, and ceases at once when this fluid has been restored to its normal condition” (T. Hun 1872, 91).

³⁶ Invoking cerebral congestion, or cerebral hyperperfusion, as a mechanism to explain apoplexy or stroke persisted into the late-nineteenth century (Román 1987). In the Presidential Address he delivered to the New York State Medical Society 12 years later, Hun would backtrack and express deep skepticism about this proposed mechanism for apoplexy, as that view led to “heroic therapies” including purgatives and bloodletting.

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Funding

The authors reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.