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surgeon, pathologist, and comparative anatomist who insisted on rigorous
scientific method. He was the first to understand the nature of digestion. Hunter was born in Lanarkshire and trained in London under his elder brother William Hunter (1718-1783), anatomist and obstetrician, who became professor of anatomy in the Royal Academy 1768 and president of the Medical Society 1781. His collection of specimens and preparations is now in the Hunterian Museum of Glasgow University; John Hunter's is housed in the Royal College of Surgeons, London. He experimented extensively on animals, and kept a number of animal specimens in his garden for dissection. He also dissected human bodies obtained from 'resurrectionists', who raided graveyards at night to sell newly buried corpses to surgeons. During the late 1760s he took up a senior surgical post at St George's Hospital, London, and was appointed physician to George III. Serving on the army surgical staff during the Seven Years' War, he gained the knowledge for a treatise on gunshot wounds. Hunter made studies of lymph and blood circulation, the sense of smell, the structure of teeth and bone, and various diseases. Experimenting with the transplantation of tissues, he fixed a human tooth into a cock's comb. He often carried out experiments on himself, and eventually died of syphilis with which he had injected himself in an attempt to prove it to be a type of gonorrhoea. |