CHAPTER 2
The Dead Man’s Arm
Covent Garden, London
September 1748
The severed arm lay on the table in the dissecting room, turning putrid. The bloodless flesh looked grotesquely pale, but the nails on the fingers seemed as lifelike as ever. Keen to impress his brother William, ten years his senior, the twenty-year-old John Hunter picked up the knife before him to begin his first human dissection.1 Virtually strangers, the two brothers had not cast eyes on each other since William had left the family farm to make his future in London when John was twelve years old. The intervening years, at least as far as William’s critical eye now assessed, had done little to improve his younger brother.
A shrewd and ambitious social climber, William had moved in ever more rarified circles since leaving Glasgow University and arriving in his “darling London” eight years previously.2 Now thirty, he had already visited both Paris and Leiden to further his anatomy studies, obtained his surgeon’s diploma in order to embark on a surgical career, and begun to build a fashionable practice attending the deliveries of the babies of the well-to-do. Although he had only just secured his first hospital post—as “surgeon-man-midwife” at London’s new Middlesex Hospital—and had but a few years’ private practice to his name, William was steadily accruing both wealth and esteem. Already he had pretensions to leave his lowly surgical colleagues behind and join the elevated ranks of the physicians, who enjoyed the highest status in London’s rigid medical hierarchy.
Yet for all William’s self-assurance, climbing the greasy pole of Georgian English society was no easy ascent for a Scot of relatively humble beginnings and with limited connections. The Jacobite uprising in 1745 and the British army’s bloody victory at Culloden the following year were still fresh in English memories. No matter that most Lowland and urban Scots had no sympathy with the revolt, anti-Scots prejudice was rife. Accordingly, William had smoothed his Scottish burr and anglicized his country manners in order to blend in with polite London society. Elegantly attired in brocade and lace, and sporting a full powdered wig, he dined with fellow Scottish intellectuals, including the novelist Tobias Smollett, the physician John Pringle, and the painter Allan Ramsay, who had similarly gravitated to the metropolis in a collective migration of talent from universities in Glasgow and Edinburgh. But astute William had managed to penetrate English social circles, too, forging connections with influential men, such as the magistrate and writer Henry Fielding and the diarist Horace Walpole. Between coffeehouses and theaters, dissecting rooms and salons, William skillfully bridged both the divergent Scots and English cultures and the contrasting worlds of science and the arts.
Not only was William a sophisticated socialite, he also possessed a smart business sense—vital in the risky world of Georgian enterprise, where commercial know-how mattered as much as knowing the right people. The anatomy school he had established in Covent Garden two years earlier had proved both a popular and a profitable venture. Aspiring young surgeons, attracted to London from throughout the British Isles and overseas to walk the wards of the capital’s grim charity hospitals, had flocked to the school for expert tuition in dissection. Indeed, so successful had his classes become that William now desperately needed help to run the business. With classes beginning in just two weeks’ time, he was anxious that his younger brother should prove a competent and biddable assistant—especially when it came to taking over the more sinister side of his enterprise.
The prospects did not appear promising. An awkward, uncultured, and largely uneducated country lad, the slight youth with his shock of red hair had failed utterly to distinguish himself to date. Eschewing all scholarly pursuits, he had so far frittered away his days on the family farm, displaying no obvious aim or ambition. After briefly toying with enlisting in the army, he had been prompted by an apparent sudden impulse to offer his assistance to William and make the arduous two-week journey on horseback from Lanarkshire down to London. Now he found himself shrinking in the full glare of his clever elder brother’s attention, presented with the biggest challenge of his uneventful life so far: to dissect a rotting limb and tease out the muscles under William’s rigorous scrutiny.
Surrounded by skeletons and skulls, bones hanging from rafters, and organs pickled in jars, he steeled himself against the sight and stench of human remains as he picked up the knife William proffered. Making the first cut through the leathery skin of the man’s arm, he was careful not to flinch or show his distaste to watchful William. He knew that this was a crucial test, the most important moment in his life so far. At last, he was being given a chance to prove his worth.
Born in deep midwinter, in the early hours of February 14, 1728, John Hunter was the tenth child in a farming family struggling to make ends meet in the rugged countryside south of Glasgow.3 With three children, including an earlier John, having already died, and their aging father, also named John, worried over finances for his large family as well as his own failing health, the arrival of another mouth to feed was not particularly welcome. John Hunter, Sr., who was sixty-five by the time of his youngest son’s birth, plainly neglected his latest offspring in favor of his studious older boys, James and William, then thirteen and ten. It was left to John’s mother, Agnes, and his four older sisters—Janet, Agnes, Dorothy, and Isobel—to bestow attention on the baby of the family.
Reputedly descended from Norman ancestors, the Hunters of Hunterston in Ayrshire, John Hunter, Sr., had married Agnes Paul, the daughter of a prosperous Glaswegian family, in 1707, the year of English and Scottish union. He was forty-four and she was twenty-two.4 They baptized their first child, the original John, in 1708 and buried him fourteen years later. Their second child, Elizabeth, died at just one year, and a second son, Andrew, survived only to the age of three. Trading as a grain merchant in the market village of East Kilbride, John Hunter, Sr., had also acquired some farmland, and after the birth of four more children, the family moved from their village home to a thatched stone house at Long Calderwood, a mile to the northeast, making this farmstead the center of their small world.5
Although they were relatively well off by the standards of most local people, who lived from hand to mouth in pitiful conditions, it was nevertheless a comfortless existence for a large family, squeezed as they were into a smoky two-bedroom cottage.6 A single peat fire provided the only source of heat and the children slept in box beds, which were pulled out of the walls like giant drawers each night. Winters were long and severe, and the Clyde Valley soil poorly drained, so it was a relentless battle to eke out an existence for a growing family. Just a year after John Hunter was born, his father had to sell a parcel of land in order to send fourteen-year-old James to train as a lawyer in Edinburgh and William to Glasgow University to study theology for a career in the Scottish kirk.
Ignored by his father, indulged by his mother, and pampered by his older sisters, young “Jock” or “Johnny,” as he was variously nicknamed, grew up a headstrong boy. While his mother found her wayward son difficult to control, his father appeared to neither know nor care how his youngest child spent his days. So although Johnny was sent daily to the village school where his brothers had distinguished themselves, whenever he could, he skipped lessons to go rambling through the woods and fields, stalking wild animals in the undergrowth. For all his mother’s encouragement, he detested lessons and books with a vengeance, as he later recalled:
When I was a boy it was a little reading and writing, a great deal of spelling and figures; geography which never got beyond the dullest statistics, and a little philosophy and chemistry as dry as sawdust, and as valuable for deading [deadening] purposes. I wanted to know about the clouds and the grasses, why the leaves change colour in the autumn. I watched the ants, bees, birds, tadpoles, and caddis worms. I pestered people with questions about what nobody knew or cared anything about.7
According to his sister Dorothy, young Johnny “would do nothing but what he liked and neither liked to be taught reading nor writing nor any kind of learning.”8 Although he was “by no means considered as a stupid boy,” he made such little progress with his lessons that at thirteen he abandoned formal education.
At a time when Scotland prided itself on its kirk-run school system and the Scots boasted literacy levels well in excess of their English neighbors, John’s obstinacy toward learning was a heartfelt family disappointment. His hatred of books was so intense that he probably suffered some form of dyslexia, for not only did he struggle with schooling throughout childhood, being unable to read or write until his teens, but he also retained his distaste for all things academic throughout his life. Certainly he could dash off a letter in a well-formed script as well as anyone—although his spelling was erratic even by eighteenth-century standards and his grammar equally idiosyncratic—but whenever possible, in later life, he dictated his thoughts to assistants and even had books read out loud to him. 9 He almost reveled in his disdain for the printed word. Although he would build up a respectable library, he liked to declare that he “totally rejected books,” preferring to take up “the volume of the animal body.”10
Not surprisingly, John Hunter’s aversion to literary pursuits would provide powerful ammunition for later enemies, particularly the snobbish Jessé Foot—although he only dared publish his malevolent biography the year after Hunter’s death. Mistakenly attempting to equate Hunter’s literacy difficulties with a lack of intelligence, Foot claimed that the surgeon “was incapable of putting six lines together grammatically into English.” 11 As a result, alleged Foot, Hunter had not personally written a single word of any of his publications, employing instead his friend Smollett—among others—as a ghostwriter. Foot even went so far as to blame this “want of the polish of education” for Hunter’s notoriously colorful language. Hunter certainly loved to damn and curse in an age when polite conversation was considered the mark of a gentleman. His pupils would later feel moved to excuse his bad language, while nineteenth-century editors of his works deemed it necessary to excise his oaths. And he admitted enlisting some editorial help with his writings. But the reams of written material Hunter produced, in scientific papers to the Royal Society, voluminous published works, and innumerable letters, easily demonstrated his ability to put pen to paper. Indeed, Foot wanted to have it both ways: He also charged Hunter with concealing his reading prowess in order to plagiarize rivals without suspicion.
Hunter’s early distrust of the written word would make him forever skeptical of classical teaching and the slavish repetition of ancient beliefs. He always preferred to believe the evidence of his own eyes rather than the recorded views of others. From his earliest years, roaming the countryside of Lanarkshire when he should have been poring over Latin primers at a school desk, he sought the solutions to the questions that puzzled him through painstaking observation and experiment.
There was ample opportunity on and around the family farm, with its steady stream of births and deaths among the horses, cattle, and fowl. The inquisitive Johnny would have witnessed local farmers’ attempts at crude veterinary care when their animals fell ill and may have helped to nurse sickly youngsters back to life. He studied the behavior of wildlife in the nearby hills and valleys and would remember some of these observations all his life. Possibly he was encouraged by his older sisters, since his closest sister in age, Isobel, was said to have enjoyed petting the foals and calves born on the farm.
Many of the questions that were evidently sparked by these earliest observations—such as pinpointing the exact moment when an embryo begins to form in a hen’s egg, determining what distinguishes a living, breathing creature from a lifeless carcass, and even puzzling over the origins of the human species itself—would occupy him all his life. As he would later comment, “I love to be puzzled, for then I am sure I shall learn something valuable.”12 Equally, his childish awe at the powers of nature would never leave him. “No chemist on earth can make out of the earth a piece of sugar but a vegetable can do it,” he later wrote, and he marveled at reproduction: “This production of Animals out of themselves excites wonder, admiration, and curiosity.”13
But at the age of thirteen, leaving the village school in the same year that his father died, the adolescent John Hunter was left with no more material purpose in life than to help his mother and sisters run the farm. Both of his older brothers had since changed their earlier plans and thrown in their lot with medicine, yet Johnny felt no urge to follow suit. William left Glasgow University after five years without taking his degree in theology, having fallen under the spell of one of the founding figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, the philosopher Francis Hutcheson. Imbibing Hutcheson’s liberally minded approach to religion was manifestly at odds with William’s intended career in the kirk. His plans for the church abandoned, William was taken under the wing of the family physician, the kindly William Cullen, who would become a towering force for scientific progress on the Scottish medical scene. Cullen trained William in basic medicine, sent him to Edinburgh University to study anatomy, and in 1740 packed him off to London to learn the latest approach to childbirth, all with a view to setting up partnership together on William’s return. Eldest brother James, meanwhile, had followed William to London in a joint bid to make their names in medicine.
A passion for medical care did little to help the family. Agnes fell ill and died at just twenty-five years old. Her sister Isobel followed her to the grave at only seventeen, and finally James, the eldest son and brightest star in the family’s firmament, returned home with the classic signs of consumption. Seventeen-year-old John stood helplessly at his brother’s bedside as he coughed up blood and died a slow, painful death in the prime of life. His premature demise left William head of the family, with more necessity than ever to make his London enterprises a success, while John languished at home in an increasingly empty house.
So six of John Hunter’s nine siblings, as well as his father, had been carried to the little graveyard encircling the East Kilbride parish church. Although the loss of those closest to him through his teenage years left a deep mental scar, such a death toll was by no means uncommon by Georgian standards. Life expectancy as an average in England in the middle of the eighteenth century was just thirty-seven years—and would have been roughly similar in Scotland—although this stark figure masks a disproportionately high death rate in childhood.14 Surviving infancy was life’s biggest battle; having reached adulthood, there was a fair chance of attaining a ripe old age. In London, where child death rates were highest, almost half of the babies born between 1750 and 1769 never reached their second birthdays. Burials far exceeded baptisms in the capital throughout most of the century. 15 In spite of the city’s thriving funeral business—guaranteeing ample research material for anatomists—London’s population continued to mushroom, since impoverished families migrated from the countryside in their search for work faster than their predecessors expired. Contagious diseases ran rampant in the city, thanks to appalling poverty and malnutrition, overcrowding in slum dwellings, and filthy living conditions. While the carcasses of dead animals lay rotting in the streets, open sewers carried human excrement and animal offal down central gutters. But prospects of health were little better in the countryside, where poor harvests and disease epidemics could equally lead to early death.
Although Georgian families no longer needed to fear the medieval scourges of plague and leprosy, there were plenty of other menaces to worry about. A child born into eighteenth-century Britain required a tough constitution and no small amount of luck to evade or defeat the innumerable infectious diseases—diphtheria, measles, mumps, scarlet fever, influenza, and consumption (tuberculosis), to name but a few—lying in wait in the first years of life. Where disease failed to snare the youngster, malnutrition, neglect, and misguided child rearing often succeeded. Babies were force-fed with sugared and alcohol-laced pap from germ-ridden cups, soothed with weak beer or straight gin, and swaddled in blankets that were rarely changed. And throughout adolescence, there were many more epidemics to battle, from the typhus fever that reigned in jails, hospitals, and ships to the dreaded smallpox virus, which accounted for 10 percent of all deaths, killing a fifth of those it struck and hideously disfiguring many more.
Surviving this obstacle course conferred lifelong immunity against a raft of diseases, but negotiating adulthood was still precarious. Life hung on a slender string. With no modern antibiotics to fight bacteria, a healthy adult could fall suddenly sick with a contagious fever and be dead within days. For women, childbirth was an additionally hazardous experience. Many died during agonizing deliveries or succumbed to sepsis days later, especially in the “lying-in” hospitals that sprang up from the middle of the century and provided new breeding grounds for bacteria. Even for those adults who reached middle age, there were still innumerable ailments and complaints—from gout to bladder stones, venereal disease to toothache— that could cause pain and discomfort, with little hope of cure or relief.
With so many risks to life and limb, it is little wonder that the Georgians were fanatical in their pursuit of health. Letters, diaries, novels, and newspapers reveal an almost unhealthy preoccupation with the workings of the human body. Whether conversing with family or friend, business associate or acquaintance, the Georgians reveled in reporting intimate details of their bodily functions and personal ailments, while everyone had a favorite homespun remedy to recommend. Among the least palatable were toxic potions, violent purges that acted as laxatives, emetics that induced vomiting, and the copious letting of blood.
Those who could afford the time and money were obsessed with the latest fads in treatment, to the point of hypochondria. And there was no lack of variety; when it came to health care, the Georgians were spoiled by the number of choices. With no effective regulation or policing, and no consensus on diagnosis or therapy, a patient was equally likely to buy a noxious potion from a traveling quack, an herbal concoction stewed by the village wise woman, or a traditional remedy prescribed by a learned physician— and sometimes all three.
It should have been a golden age for medicine. In the previous century, the philosopher Francis Bacon had confidently predicted that scientific progress would bring nature firmly under control. In 1628, the English physician William Harvey had discredited prevailing medical beliefs when he proved that the heart, not the liver, propelled the blood around the body in a continuous circulation. Further anatomical discoveries served to reinforce the notion promulgated by the French scientist René Descartes, the driving force of the scientific revolution, that the body was more like a machine than a mysterious receptacle for the soul. A new spirit of optimism was in the air as the Royal Society, founded in 1660, and, in France, the Académie Royale des Sciences, ushered in an era of natural philosophy, in which scientific experimentation was heralded as the stepping-stone to a modern society.16
So much for the theory; the reality was rather more down-to-earth. The promise of the scientific revolution did little, if anything, to render medicine safer or more effective. Health care still waited for its enlightenment, and the eighteenth century became a free-for-all for mountebanks, cranks, and meddling medics. While learned physicians, flourishing doctorates from Oxford, Cambridge, and universities across Europe, paid lip service to scientific progress, in practice they clung like leeches to their classical doctrines. Apart from a few notable exceptions, most held firm to the teachings of the Greek father of medicine, Hippocrates, who taught in the fifth century B.C. that all illness was due to an imbalance of the four “humors” of the body: blood, phlegm, black bile, and choler, or yellow bile. An excess of one humor or a deficiency in another was diagnosed from patients’ eating, sleeping, and toiletary habits, inspecting their urine and stools, and occasionally by feeling the pulse, but rarely if ever by examining the site of the complaint. The remedies prescribed were designed to restore the “humoral balance,” whether through potions and pills made up by apothecaries, clysters—enemas—injected by syringe, or copious bloodletting.
Remedies were rarely anything less than drastic; that way, Georgian patients could at least feel they were getting value for their money. Patients happily submitted to being dosed with toxic elixirs, blistered by heated glass cups applied to their backs, and bled to the point of unconsciousness. Despite Harvey’s demonstration that the theory behind bloodletting—to extract blood from a specific site—was nonsense, since blood circulated through the entire body, phlebotomy only increased in popularity as a cure-all for every ill. If not recommended by physicians, it was often demanded by patients, being administered for almost every condition, from ailments in young children to prolonged childbirth. As much as thirty ounces might be removed at one sitting, often disastrously weakening the body’s natural defenses against disease.
Yet while physicians prescribed bloodletting in every circumstance, their taboo on touching the human body meant they never personally slit open a vein to let the blood flow. In the strict medical hierarchy that prevailed, all messy and distasteful jobs that involved touching or cutting flesh were left to surgeons, or to barbers and barber-surgeons, who offered bloodletting as a sideline to cutting hair and shaving beards. Far from being interlopers in the field of surgery, barbers were the first surgeons. The earliest organized medical care, in medieval times, had been centered on monasteries. But the church frowned on its devotees spilling blood, and so barbers—who were frequent visitors to the brethren in order to keep tonsures and beards in trim—assisted the monks in their medical work by excising warts, removing abscesses, and letting blood. The familiar red-and-white-striped poles outside barbershops are leftover reminders of their erstwhile professions. Originally, they signified the bandaged and bloodied stick gripped by patients during minor surgical procedures.
Understandably distrustful of organized medicine, patients turned to alternative healers—the so-called quacks—who were no less likely to prove effective. In the month before John Hunter arrived in London, Gentleman’s Magazine listed more than two hundred nostrums available in apothecary shops, ranging from “horseballs” for coughs to powders for piles.17 In the same issue, readers were enthralled by reports of Bridget Bostock, a folk healer in Cheshire, who reputedly cured every ill with the simple remedy of applying her spit. Ailing Georgians also sought relief in electric shocks and hypnotism, and even by inhaling the breath of young women. And like many infants of his day, in 1712 the toddling Samuel Johnson was lifted up to receive the “royal touch” from Queen Anne in the forlorn hope of curing his scrofula, a form of tuberculosis. 18 He wore around his neck all his life the gold “touch piece” the monarch had given him. Yet these remedies were no crankier than the ingredients authorized by the country’s most elite medical men in the directory of medicines, the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, published by the Royal College of Physicians in 1746.19 Although the updated formulary had jettisoned unicorn’s horn and moss from human skulls, it wholeheartedly endorsed oyster shells, crabs’ eyes, and ground wood lice among its “speedy, safe and pleasant Cures.”
Interventions were not only radical and unpleasant; they were often downright harmful. Indeed, of all the pills, potions, and plasters in the practitioner’s medicine bag, there was only one truly effective ingredient: cinchona, or Peruvian bark. Originally a Native American remedy brought back from the New World by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century, it contained quinine, a valuable therapy for malaria, which was still prevalent in the British Isles in the eighteenth century. Another innovation, inoculation against smallpox, where a minute amount of infectious pus taken from an afflicted person was used, had similarly been adopted from a folk remedy popular in Turkey. Initially opposed by the snooty physicians when it was introduced to Britain in 1721 by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador in Constantinople, inoculation saved countless children from certain death—although it could also prove fatal in overzealous hands. In addition, the ubiquitous prescription of opium at least provided some welcome respite from the miseries of sickness. Beyond these few aids, which owed little to learned medicine, the rest was largely useless, or worse.
It was this maelstrom of muddled, ignorant, and incompetent medical practice that the twenty-year-old John Hunter decided to enter after losing six siblings to the ravages of disease. His mother, ever concerned for her favorite son’s future, had already attempted to find him suitable employment earlier in 1748. That summer, he had gone to live briefly in Glasgow with his eldest sister, Janet, and her new husband, a wealthy but idle timber merchant.20 Although Johnny was already noted for the dexterity and neatness of his hands, it was in his brother-in-law’s timber yard, watching carpenters at work, that he learned to handle knives and saws with expert precision. Naturally enough, this short interlude, lasting at most a few months, would later provide Hunter’s enemies with an excuse to dismiss the surgeon as an “ignorant carpenter.” But before the summer was over, the timber yard had closed, its owner bankrupt, and John Hunter was back home, kicking his heels once more.
Quickly dismissing an impulse to join the army, he finally took the plunge and wrote to William, asking to join him in London, in a move that would not only transform John Hunter’s life but would alter the course of medicine forever. Desperate for a new assistant, especially one who would be bound by family loyalty to keep the murky secrets of the dissecting room, William immediately assented. So, early in September 1748, the farmer’s son left his Scottish homeland for the first time, riding the four hundred miles to London with a family friend, Thomas Hamilton, to arrive in Covent Garden just two weeks before the anatomy school opened for the autumn term.
The contrast between rural Lanarkshire and bustling, chaotic London could not have been more startling. With a population of around 675,000, almost forty times the size of Glasgow, London was the biggest city in Europe. 21 As Hunter approached from the northeast, through the pleasant villages of Tottenham, Islington, and Pentonville, the rough, rutted road became increasingly busy, while houses, shops, and taverns wrestled for space along the way. As he neared the city, the narrow, towering tenements, which housed whole families in single cellars and attic rooms, almost blocked out the sky. Negotiating the congested streets, where stagecoaches and private carriages battled for passage with farm carts and livestock, seemed hopelessly confusing; the sounds of horses’ hooves, creaking wheels, and complaining cattle were deafening. Mud, animal dung, refuse, and human waste splashed pedestrians as they walked the pavements and tried to dodge the swinging shop signs, speeding bearers of sedan chairs, and downpours of foul water from upper-story windows. By late afternoon, oil lamps lighted the smoky streets and candles illuminated shop windows displaying silk clothing and exquisite jewelry, their luxury forming a pantomime backdrop to the squalor of ragged children begging in the gutters.
In Hatton Garden, located in Holborn, where John initially joined William in lodgings, the affluent residents still enjoyed the pastoral view north toward fields and market gardens. But in Covent Garden, where William had rented rooms for his anatomy school, the once-fashionable square was now a shambling market edged by taverns, gin houses, and brothels. London’s gentry had forsaken the elegant piazza, designed in the previous century by Inigo Jones, in a concerted shift toward the cleaner air and pleasant squares of the West End. In their stead, the apartments beneath the arcades had been taken over by writers, artists, actors, and pimps. By day, hawkers yelled out their wares to passersby. By night, the neighborhood was stalked by press gangs, pickpockets, prostitutes, and armed robbers. And the view north from here, toward the desperately poor neighborhood of St. Giles, would provide Hogarth with inspiration for his famous Gin Lane, with its grotesque images of lives destroyed by the ubiquitous spirit. 22
Well used by now to such extremes of wealth and poverty, William had been settled in London for five years. Having first lodged as a pupil in midwifery with William Smellie, a fellow Scot, aspiring William had soon abandoned his down-to-earth teacher—and dissolved his partnership plans with William Cullen—in favor of a more promising alliance with another compatriot, the physician James Douglas. Inveigling himself a position with the family, he had been appointed tutor to James Douglas, Jr., and even become engaged to Douglas’s daughter, Martha. But when first Douglas and then Martha died within a year of each other, William’s plans for a rewarding future—both financially and emotionally—were scuppered. He would never again become romantically involved. Determined, nonetheless, to make his way in London, he established himself as a fashionable male midwife and forged ahead with plans to launch an anatomy school.
Amid the squalor, sexual scandal, and violent crime that characterized Covent Garden, William’s anatomy school was fast gaining its own notoriety. The first of its kind in Britain, offering young medical students daily hands-on tuition in human dissection, the school was a daring, even dangerous, venture. The study of anatomy still languished in its infancy in mid-eighteenth-century England, with inevitable ignorance about the workings of the human body among medical practitioners as a consequence. While would-be physicians spent years at universities poring over ancient texts and aspiring surgeons blithely copied the errors of their tutors during long apprenticeships, the study of the human body remained a backwater of medical education.
Some thirty years before William’s enterprise, William Cheselden, the most famous surgeon of his day, had invited medical students to private anatomy demonstrations at his home. The young surgeons crowded around the celebrated Cheselden as he demonstrated parts of the body on a corpse dragged from the gallows, cutting up the cadaver on his dining room table. But Cheselden’s anatomy dinners soon attracted the ire of the Company of Barber-Surgeons. He was disciplined in 1715, on the grounds that he “did frequently procure the Dead bodies of Malefactors from the place of execution and dissected the same at his own house.”23 The rebuke was less in response to Cheselden’s domestic arrangements than to his timing: The demonstrations clashed with the company’s own lectures.
Since its foundation by royal charter in 1540, the Company of Barber-Surgeons had secured the right to the bodies of four criminals—the number later increased to six—hanged in London each year. The corpses were dissected in public demonstrations staged several times a year, in an arrangement designed as much as the ultimate deterrent for felons as for educational purposes. By 1631, however, the company was also encountering some difficulties reconciling its anatomy duties with its catering facilities. Minutes noted that “the bodies have been a great annoyance to the tables, dresser boards and utensils in the upper kitchen by reason of the blood, filth and entrails of these anatomies.”24 A custom-built anatomy theater was finally opened in 1638. But when the barbers and surgeons split in 1745, the resulting new Company of Surgeons was temporarily homeless and therefore devoid of an anatomy theater in which to stage any demonstrations. This sorry situation would continue for almost a decade— until a new theater was built in 1753—seriously curtailing anatomy teaching in London.
Although the Company of Barber-Surgeons had sought to ban rival anatomy lectures, private classes had, in fact, flourished unchecked. Several practitioners, including James Douglas and Percivall Pott, ran lectures at their hospitals and in their own homes during the first half of the century. But these courses were short, sporadic, and generally limited in scope. There was no dedicated anatomy school in London—indeed, there was no medical school at all, in contrast to the flourishing centers in major cities in Scotland, Ireland, and on the Continent. Moreover, the difficulties associated with obtaining human bodies allowed few opportunities for students even to witness, let alone practice, dissection. Students in crowded anatomy lessons were lucky to catch a glimpse inside a single body as it decayed over several weeks. When bodies were impossible to obtain, an animal corpse was substituted. William Hunter described a typical class under Professor Alexander Monro at Edinburgh University: “There I learned a good deal by my ears; but almost nothing by my eyes; and therefore, hardly anything to the purpose. The defect was, that the professor was obliged to demonstrate all the parts of the body, except the bones, nerves and vessels, upon one dead body. There was a foetus for the nerves and blood-vessels; and the operations of surgery were explained, to very little purpose indeed, upon a dog.” 25 He was equally unimpressed by his studies in London, where the course he attended fielded only two corpses over thirty-nine lectures.
William’s experience of anatomy lessons in England and Scotland had convinced him that such courses were hopelessly inadequate as a preparation for a career in medicine. But he had also witnessed anatomy teaching in Paris and Leiden, where more liberal laws provided an abundant supply of bodies for research purposes. His entrepreneurial nose had immediately sniffed a gap in the market for a dedicated school offering comprehensive studies in anatomy in London. With the new Company of Surgeons in disarray, unable even to police private anatomy classes, let alone provide its own, William seized his opportunity. Setting up his lecture theater and dissecting room in a rented Covent Garden apartment, he imported to London the Continental approach, advertising his first course in the London Evening Post in September 1746 with this inducement: “Gentlemen may have the opportunity of learning the Art of Dissecting during the whole winter session in the same manner as at Paris.”26
When it opened its doors on October 13, 1746, the new school was a revolutionary venture. With lectures running from 5:00 P.M. until 7:30 P.M. every evening except Sundays, each course spanned more than seventy lessons. The courses were repeated in two terms, lasting almost four months each, from October to early January and from late January until April, in a step-by-step program providing a complete introduction to the subject. Perched on his podium, William held the students’ attention as he imparted up-to-the-minute knowledge on the human body in his eloquent style. As the pupils took notes, bottles of pickled organs and dried specimens of muscle and bone were passed around for them to handle and inspect.
But the school offered more than just lively lectures and interesting visual aids; each student was also guaranteed hands-on experience. Adopting the “Paris manner,” as William so discreetly put it, meant quite simply that every student was guaranteed a corpse of his own on which to practice dissection and surgical methods. For the first time, not only were pupils able to learn the basics of anatomy from an expert teacher; they could see with their own eyes precisely how the different organs, tissues, muscles, and bones interconnected. With their own hands, they could unravel the coils of the gut, trace the branches of the delicate air passageways in the lungs, and feel the weight of a human heart. Their waistcoats and breeches covered with aprons, they could spend hours delving inside a human carcass, up to their elbows in blood and guts. The school was an overnight success. Fired by a thirst for knowledge, eager to explore and discover for themselves, young students flocked to enroll from across Britain, Europe, and even the American colonies.
At last William’s finances were on a secure footing. Now determined to capitalize on the achievements of two years’ success, William—the self-made man—was keen to recruit young John—the self-taught youth—to his cause. With no time to lose before the students clamored once more at his doors, he put his brother immediately to work, setting him the critical test of dissecting an arm. Stooped over the bench, John Hunter mustered all the skills he had learned in carpentry, applied all his inborn curiosity for nature, and meticulously picked the fat from the various muscles of the limb with a dexterity unknown in a novice. The neatness and delicacy of his workmanship exceeded even William’s exacting standards. But still unconvinced, William set his brother an even harder task: to dissect a second arm, in which the arteries had been injected with colored wax, separating the vivid blood vessels from the fleshy muscles. Once again, John’s performance surpassed all his brother’s expectations. William even went so far as to predict that his young brother had the makings of an excellent anatomist who should never want for employment.27
This was high praise indeed from the fastidious elder brother. As far as William was concerned, it was plain that his stubborn, rough-edged, untutored brother—the wild child of the family—could be successfully molded into the competent, compliant workhorse he needed to help run the school. William was certain that under his careful tutoring and guidance, his young brother could become a skilled assistant and perhaps even an able surgeon, leaving William free to pursue his own goal of becoming a respectable physician and a wealthy gentleman. Encouraging and ambitious for his new ward, William was like a true father figure—everything John’s own father had not been—or at least it appeared that way so long as John remained firmly in his shadow.
So on the first day of the autumn term, John Hunter took his place in the lecture theater as his brother rose to greet the new class. After detailing the purpose of anatomy, the history of the subject, and the program for the busy next three months, William outlined to the impressionable youngsters gathered in the room the stark choice that now lay before them. If they chose to idle away their days and skimp on their studies, then they would forever struggle to find work, want for money, and tread “a low path in life.” But if they worked hard, studied diligently, and pursued perfection, then, he assured them, they would be respected, courted, and satisfied with their lot. In the eighteenth-century can-do society, an ambitious young man with a will to work, a few connections, and a mind to adopt the correct manners could truly take the world by storm, insisted William. Rising to his finale, he urged, “and I firmly believe, that it is in your power not only to chuse, but to have, which rank you please in the world.” 28
Nobody listened more attentively than his own young brother. Almost overnight, the carefree youth became an industrious young man; the aimless boy found his lifelong passion; the diffident Jock of the Scottish Lowlands was transformed into the popular, fun-loving Jack who frequented the taverns, theaters, and coffeehouses of Covent Garden. His days were fully employed: preparing specimens at first light every morning for the students to peruse, demonstrating anatomy skills and the art of preserving parts in the dissecting room all day, and listening beside his fellow pupils at William’s lectures every evening. But even then there was little rest. One more task fell to Jack Hunter, but this job could only take place under cover of darkness. While William built up his bank balance and his reputation, rapidly becoming London’s most sought-after accoucheur, John was put in charge of the seamier side of his business: procuring the school’s essential teaching material.