John Hunter

John Hunter: The Surgeon Who Made Surgery a Science

When Charles Byrne, the Irish giant, was dying in 1783, he begged that his body be sunk at sea, because he knew what London's anatomists did to remarkable corpses. John Hunter is said to have bribed a member of the funeral party and had the coffin filled with rocks at an overnight stop. The skeleton, seven feet seven inches tall, went into his collection, and he published a description of it. By then that collection held nearly 14,000 anatomical preparations from over 500 species, and it was the most systematic attempt anyone in Britain had made to understand what bodies are and how they work.

The Boy Who Showed Little Talent

Hunter was born on 13 February 1728 at Long Calderwood, a farm near East Kilbride, the youngest of ten children of John Hunter and Agnes Paul. Three siblings had died before he arrived. He was an indifferent scholar — by the flat verdict of the record, he showed little talent — and spent his youth helping his brother-in-law as a cabinet-maker.

What he had was an elder brother, William Hunter, who was building a reputation in London as an anatomist. In 1748, nearly twenty-one, John went south to work in his brother's dissecting room. Whatever the schoolroom had failed to find in him, the dissecting table found immediately. He became expert fast and was soon running the practical classes himself. He studied surgery under William Cheselden at Chelsea Hospital and Percival Pott at St Bartholomew's, and worked with the anatomist and wax modeller Marie Marguerite Bihéron. He was assistant surgeon at St George's Hospital from 1756.

Belle Île

In 1760 he took a commission as an army surgeon, serving on the expedition to the French island of Belle Île in 1761 and with the army in Portugal in 1762. It was the making of him twice over. He saw gunshot wounds in volume, and the research he began on them became one of the great preoccupations of his career. He also collected specimens wherever he went, in France and Portugal alike.

Leaving the army in 1763, he spent at least five years in partnership with the London dentist James Spence, performing tooth transplants, and in 1764 opened his own anatomy school. He became full surgeon at St George's in 1768 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767. In 1776 he was made surgeon to King George III, and in March 1790 Pitt appointed him surgeon general.

He married Anne Home in 1771 — a poet in her own right whose verses Haydn set to music. They had four children, two of whom died before the age of five.

Leicester Square

In 1783 he moved to a large house in Leicester Square, chiefly because he needed the room. The collection he arranged there was not a cabinet of curiosities but an argument: specimens laid out to show how structures vary across species and how bodies adapt to and compensate for damage. It served research and teaching at once, and drew on the whole reach of British exploration — kangaroos brought back from Joseph Banks's voyage with Cook among them.

The methods of acquisition were ruthless and, as the Hunterian Museum now acknowledges, paid little regard for the dead. Body-snatching was not then illegal, which is not the same as saying it was decent. Byrne is the case that still shadows his reputation.

The work itself was extraordinary in range. Hunter investigated tooth structure and the growth and remodelling of bone; digestion and the lacteals; the lymphatic system; child development; and the separation of maternal and foetal blood supplies. He recorded the first artificial insemination in 1790. He argued that inflammation was not itself the disease but the body's response to it — one of the genuinely load-bearing ideas in the history of medicine. The adductor canal of the thigh is still called Hunter's canal.

He published *The Natural History of the Human Teeth* in 1771, *A Treatise on the Venereal Diseases* in 1786, and *A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation and Gun-shot Wounds* posthumously in 1794.

Being Wrong

Hunter believed gonorrhoea and syphilis were one disease caused by one agent, and he was wrong, with consequences: the error held back accurate understanding for fifty-one years, until Philippe Ricord's work in France. The famous story that he proved his theory by inoculating himself with pus from a gonorrhoea patient, unknowingly contracting syphilis, has been part of his legend for two centuries. Modern scholars reading the 1786 treatise conclude the experiment it describes was almost certainly performed on a third party, not on himself — which, if anything, makes the episode less heroic and more troubling.

His students were his other great work, and Edward Jenner is the one who settles the argument. Jenner's vaccination is the clearest demonstration of what the Hunterian method taught — that a question should be settled by experiment rather than by authority.

He died on 16 October 1793 of a heart attack brought on by an argument at St George's Hospital over the admission of students. He was buried at St Martin-in-the-Fields, and reburied in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey in 1859.

Why John Is Called a Genius

Hunter's claim is that he changed what surgery was for. Before him, surgery was a manual trade — cutting, setting, amputating — largely separate from the study of how bodies function. Hunter fused them. His distinctive cognitive habit was comparative and experimental: to look at a structure in a human being and immediately ask how it appears in a fish, a bird, a kangaroo, what it is for, and what happens when it is damaged. The 14,000 specimens are not a hoard; they are that question, made physical, across 500 species. From that method came the insight about inflammation, the work on gunshot wounds, the first recorded artificial insemination, and — through Jenner — vaccination.

The counter-case is substantial. He was frequently wrong, and his conviction that gonorrhoea and syphilis were one disease delayed the truth for half a century. He was a poor scholar as a boy and never a fluent writer; his most important book on blood and inflammation appeared only after his death. His ethics were bad even allowing for his century: Charles Byrne asked not to be dissected, said so publicly, and Hunter took him anyway, and no account of his mind is honest that leaves that out. What is not disputable is the method. He insisted that surgeons should investigate rather than defer, and the profession that resulted is the one we still have.

Legacy

In 1799 the government bought Hunter's papers and specimens and presented them to the Company of Surgeons; they remain the core of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, alongside the Hunterian Society named for him. His name is on the John Hunter Clinic at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and the Hunterian Neurosurgical Laboratory at Johns Hopkins. He was widely recognised as the leading surgeon of his time by the late 1780s and has never really lost the title. The unresolved part of the legacy stands in a museum case, and the argument about whether Charles Byrne's skeleton should ever have been there is the same argument Byrne himself tried to have, and lost.

Achievements

• Fellow of the Royal Society
• Copley Medal — 1787
• Croonian Medal and Lecture — 1775
• Held posts at University of London