TIXE influence of John Hunter manifested itself in widely different directions in the surgical generations which immediately succeeded him. The physiological side predominated in Abernethy, the purely surgical in Cline, the philosophical in Lawrence. Green alone united the morphological, the surgical, and the metaphysical aspects of Hunter's complex character in such measure that he was able to grasp it in its entirety. Enlightened by a liberal education, Green recognized Hunter's genius ; but, early becoming lost in the mazes of transcendental philosophy and the metaphysical speculations which delighted Coleridge, he failed to advance along the paths which Hunter had traced, and remained to the end a philosopher, where he might easily have become a pioneer in surgery.
Born at 11, London Wall, on November 1, 1791, he was the only child of a wealthy London merchant, his mother being sister to Henry Cline, surgeon to St. Thomas's Hospital. A delicate boy, he was educated at Ramsgate and Hammersmith until, at the age of fifteen, accompanied by his mother, he went to Germany, where he spent three years in Berlin and in Hanover.
He was apprenticed to his uncle at St. Thomas's Hospital in 1809, and in 1813-the rule against the marriage of apprentices having been just rescinded-he married Anne Eliza Hammond, daughter of a surgeon at Southgate and the sister of one of Cline's dressers.
For the next two years he lived at 6, Martin's Lane, E.C., where his father was in business, and during this time he acted as Cline's anatomical prosector, giving a regular course of demonstrations on practical anatomy. He obtained his diploma at the College of Surgeons in December, 1815, and immediately began to practise, first at 22, and afterwards at 46, Lincoln's Inn Fields, then the fashionable neighbourhood for surgeons.
In 1816 he was formally appointed Demonstrator of Anatomy a t St. Thomas's Hospital, and in this position he was called upon to perform many of the duties which are now assigned to the resident surgical officer in a large general hospital. The summer of 1817 was spent with his wife in a journey to Germany for the express purpose of reading philosophy with Professor Solger, of Berlin. He was elected joint Lecturer on Anatomy and Physiology with Astley Cooper in 1818, and on June 14, 1820, was chosen surgeon to St. Thomas's Hospital in the room of his cousin, Henry Cline the younger, who had died of phthisis a t the age of thirty-nine. Shortly after his appointment as surgeon he undertook the Lectureship on Surgery and Pathology in the united schools of St. Thomas's and Guy's Hospitals, again conjointly with Astley Cooper.
In 1824 he gave the first of a series of four courses of lectures on comparative anatomy at the Royal Cqlege of Surgeons, in which he dealt for the first time in England with the whole of the animal sub-kingdoms. Richard Owen wrote of these lectures that they " combined the totality with the unity of the higher philosophy of the science. . . .