John Hunter (surgeon)

John Hunter, a Scottish surgeon born in 1728 and died in 1793, was one of the most respected scientists and surgeons of his era. He pushed for careful observation and scientific methods in medicine. He taught and worked with Edward Jenner, who later pioneered the smallpox vaccine. Hunter’s wife, Anne Hunter, was a poet whose work was set to music by Joseph Haydn.

Hunter learned anatomy by helping his older brother William with dissections at William’s anatomy school in London, starting in 1748. He quickly became an expert. He served as an Army surgeon for a few years, worked with dentist James Spence on tooth transplants, and opened his own anatomy school in London in 1764. He collected living animals, then prepared their skeletons and organs as specimens. In the end, he had nearly 14,000 preparations showing the anatomy of humans and other vertebrates, including over 3,000 animals.

Hunter became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1787. The Hunterian Society of London and the Hunterian Museum in London are named after him, and the museum still holds his collection.

Hunter was born at Long Calderwood, the youngest of ten children. Three siblings died of illness before he was born. His older brother William was also an anatomist. As a youth, Hunter showed little talent and worked for his brother-in-law as a cabinet-maker.

At nearly 21, he joined William in London, where William was a respected anatomy teacher. Hunter started as an assistant in dissections and soon ran the practical classes himself. It has been alleged that William and his former tutor William Smellie were responsible for many deaths of pregnant women whose corpses were used for their studies. Hunter is alleged to have been connected to these deaths as his brother’s assistant. However, scholars of Georgian London note that the number of pregnant women who died in London during that time was not unusually high. Pre-eclampsia, a common condition affecting 10% of pregnancies with no known treatment then, would explain the mortality rate that seems high today. In his 1774 book *The Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures*, Hunter provided case histories for at least four of the subjects illustrated.

Hunter researched blood while bloodletting patients, which led him to believe that inflammation was a bodily response to disease, not a disease itself. He studied under William Cheselden at Chelsea Hospital and Percival Pott at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and also with Marie Marguerite Bihéron, a famous anatomist and wax modeller in London—some illustrations in his text were likely hers. After qualifying, he worked at St George’s Hospital as an assistant surgeon from 1756 and as a surgeon from 1768. He was commissioned as an Army surgeon in 1760, served on an expedition to Belle Île in 1761, and with the British Army in 1762.

Hunter left the Army in 1763 and spent at least five years working with dentist James Spence. He set up his own anatomy school in London in 1764 and began private surgical practice.

Elected to the Royal Society in 1767, Hunter was considered the leading authority on venereal diseases. He believed gonorrhoea and syphilis were caused by a single pathogen. A common legend claims he inoculated himself with gonorrhoea using a needle contaminated with syphilis, contracting both and believing it proved his theory. But his 1786 treatise *A Treatise on the Venereal Diseases* does not indicate self-experimentation—the experiment was likely done on a third party. Hunter treated gonorrhoea and syphilis with mercury and cauterization. Because of his reputation, knowledge about the true nature of these diseases was set back, and his theory was not disproven until 51 years later by French physician Philippe Ricord.

In 1768, Hunter was appointed surgeon to St George’s Hospital and later became a member of the Company of Surgeons. In 1776, he was appointed surgeon to King George III. In 1783, he moved to a large house in Leicester Square, where he arranged his collection of nearly 14,000 preparations from over 500 species into a teaching museum. That same year, he acquired the skeleton of the 2.31-metre Irish giant Charles Byrne, against Byrne’s clear deathbed wish to be buried at sea. Hunter bribed a member of the funeral party, filled the coffin with rocks, and later published a scientific description of the skeleton. Legal scholar Thomas Muinzer notes that Byrne is now on permanent display as a freak exhibit.