Sir JONATHAN Hutchinson is regarded as our last great multispecialist of medicine. He was a combination of teacher, naturalist, philosopher, and "a student and seeker after truth to the end of his days."1 In the voluminous literature that has been written concerning him and his writings,2 the best short description is that in an excerpt from an address by Sir William Osler3:
He is the only great generalized specialist which the profession has produced, and his works are a storehouse upon which the surgeon, the physician, the neurologist, the dermatologist and other specialists freely draw. When anything turns up which is anomalous or peculiar and cyclopaedias are dumb, I tell my students to turn to the volumes of Mr. Hutchinson's Archives of Surgery, as, if it is not mentioned in them, it surely is something very much out of the common.
His contributions to the various fields