CHAPTER 10

The Kangaroo’s Skull

Plymouth

August 1768

After five days spent waiting apprehensively while summer storms lashed the south coast, at last, on August 25, the clouds cleared and a fair wind coaxed the Endeavour out of Plymouth harbor.¹ Crammed with a year’s supply of provisions, packed with scientific instruments, and crewed by eightyfive sailors, including a drummer, the little ship’s destination was the other side of the world. The voyage was the first dedicated scientific mission of its kind. Inspired by the Royal Society, bankrolled by George III, and victualed by the Royal Navy, the expedition had two important aims: to observe the transit of Venus across the sun from the South Pacific island of Tahiti and to search for a fabled hidden continent in the Southern Hemisphere.

In command was James Cook, the good-looking and good-natured lieutenant who had made his name during the Seven Years War. Like John Hunter, Cook was the son of a humble Scottish farmer, although his family had settled in Yorkshire; like Hunter, he was forty that year. On board with him were two of Hunter’s closest friends, Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, both intent on discovering new varieties of flora and fauna with which to delight fellow naturalists. At just twenty-five, Banks displayed all the self-confidence of his privileged background and his education at Harrow, Eton, and Oxford. Having come into a fortune yielding six thousand pounds a year at the age of twenty-one, he could comfortably afford the ten thousand pounds he had committed to the expedition. Along with a retinue of seven attendants and a pair of greyhounds, Banks had packed a welter of nets, hooks, and containers for catching and preserving wildlife. Invited by Banks to join the trip, the plump, affable Solander had jumped at the chance, promptly obtaining leave from the British Museum to join the voyage.

With the holds already crammed full, there was little space for Banks and his entourage. But this was no deterrent to the botanizing aristocrat. “No people ever went to sea better fitted out for the purpose of Natural History, nor more elegantly,” the naturalist John Ellis wrote excitedly to his pen pal Linnaeus.² With Cook forced to share his captain’s cabin with Banks and Solander, it was a cramped but happy ship that headed for the open seas.

Back in London, Hunter waited eagerly for news of his friends’ discoveries. Charting the stars and seeking lost continents were of little interest to him; as far as he was concerned, the principal purpose of the expedition was to bring back new and exotic wildlife to boost his burgeoning collection. Now that he had built up his reputation as a private surgeon and an expert anatomist, his renown as a naturalist was spreading just as fast. He had become every bit as adept at procuring animal carcasses as he was at obtaining human cadavers; only the suppliers were different. Hunter was a familiar figure at traveling shows and circuses, where he promised animal keepers a bounty if they saved him the bodies of their charges when they died. He was a frequent visitor, too, at London’s markets, shops, and animal dealers, where customers could buy all manner of creatures as pets, livestock, or ingredients for the cooking pot. Having obtained his wolf-dog puppy from “Wild Beast Brookes,” who sold an assortment of exotic animals at his shop in the New Road, Hunter bought eels every month from a local fishmonger in an attempt to discover their method of generation. At the same time, he cultivated friendships with various aristocrats who kept rare animals in their private menageries, pestering them for carcasses.

Obtaining exotic animals was easier than might be imagined in eighteenth-century London; the capital was a cornucopia of wildlife.³ The royal menagerie was the city’s most popular tourist attraction. Officially established in 1235 with the gift of three leopards to Henry III, the menagerie had steadily expanded with successive royal acquisitions. By 1767, the year before the Endeavour left Plymouth, visitors could see five male lions, three lionesses, two lion cubs, a panther, a leopard, and four tigers with the genteel names of Sir Richard, Miss Groggery, Miss Jenny, and Miss Nancy.⁴ How many of these exhibits ended up on Hunter’s dissection bench is unrecorded, although his catalog of pickled animal parts from around the same period bears an uncanny resemblance to the menagerie’s inventory. Later writings refer specifically to an ocelot, an antelope, two hyenas, and a caracal, or desert lynx, all received from the Tower.⁵

For those who could not afford the menagerie’s sixpence admission fee, there was no shortage of opportunities to see rare animals. Fairs, novelty acts, and freak shows featured dancing bears, performing monkeys, and even trained bees, while traveling menageries displayed exotic creatures brought back from foreign explorations. One guidebook to London’s attractions even claimed that there were ‘Lions, Tygers, Elephants, &c in every Street in Town.”⁶ While this boast may have been an exaggeration, it certainly contained a kernel of truth. On one occasion, Hunter burst into the bookshop belonging to his friend George Nicol and begged the loan of five guineas; it was needed, he explained, to buy “a magnificent tiger which is now dying in Castle Street.”⁷ Having won his friend’s consent, Hunter had the tiger’s corpse carted away to his dissecting table.

Though a tiger dying in a West End thoroughfare could still excite Hunter’s enthusiasm, other animals were commonplace. With the livestock regularly driven through London’s streets, the popular bear- and bull-baiting events, and the many more animals unloaded at the docks for consumption—turtles were shipped in alive as dinner-table delicacies—and for entertainment—monkeys were popular pets—London was fairly overrun with exotic creatures.

This abundance of wildlife did little to enhance the populace’s general knowledge of the animal kingdom, however. Many Georgians still believed in the existence of unicorns, dragons, and mermen, and books offered little enlightenment. In his famous 1755 dictionary, Samuel Johnson described whales as “fish” and made no mention of giraffes. Although a giraffelike beast came under the name “camelopard”—it reputedly had extremely long legs, a long neck, and a spotted brown-and-white hide—it was still doubted that such peculiar-sounding animals could exist.⁸

Making full use of London’s myriad opportunities for studying wildlife, Hunter had voraciously enlarged his natural history collection. By the time Cook, Banks, and Solander set sail, he had already accumulated assorted parts from a lion, a porpoise, a seal, a monkey, a leopard, an opossum, a mongoose, a flying squirrel, and a mole from South Carolina, as well as his lizards from Portugal and Belle-Ile, numerous examples of native British species, and the two elephant jaws he had shown his brother. Many of the rarer animals were the first of their kind to be seen in Britain. Every new animal he obtained was transported back to his home and laid out on his dissecting bench, where Hunter wielded his knife and tweezers to explore its internal structure. Interesting organs were preserved in spirits and unusual characteristics meticulously noted in a catalog.

When he moved from Golden Square to William’s former house at 42 Jermyn Street, his collection of dried bones, skulls, skins, and pickled organs went along, too. As the animal carcasses arrived at his back door with increasing regularity, the fledgling collection soon took over several of the best rooms of the house. And just as John Ellis had sought Hunter’s expertise in dissecting the greater siren, so other amateur naturalists now begged his help whenever they obtained previously unknown species. According to Everard Home, Hunter’s future brother-in-law, “no new animal was brought to this country which was not shewn to him.”⁹

But the heart of London’s West End was not the ideal location for dissecting and experimenting on large and often noisy wild animals. For this, his country retreat at Earls Court, two miles beyond London’s boundaries, was perfect. Having bought the farmland in 1765, Hunter had begun building a house there shortly afterward and had since added extensions to form a modest country villa with a variety of outbuildings.¹⁰ Nobody who passed its iron gates, which fronted the east side of what would become Earls Court Road, could do so without stopping to stare. Though the two-story house was unremarkable in itself, the crocodile’s jaw that yawned wide over the front porch gave an early signal of its owner’s unusual preoccupations. But it was the scene surrounding the house that really drew gasps from passersby. Its typically English lawns were grazed not only by sheep, horses, and cattle but by zebra, Asiatic buffalos, and mountain goats, while neighbors could hear the roars of lions and snarls of leopards emanating from a large grassy mound within the garden. Beneath this hillock, Hunter had built three dens to house his collection of wildcats.

Visitors brave enough to enter the grounds first passed a fish pond decorated with animal skulls. Nearing the house, the howls of dogs and jackals chained in the kennels mingled with the cacophony of noises from the pigs, donkeys, and domestic fowl scrubbing for food in the yard. To one side, a large conservatory vibrated with the hum of bees entering and leaving glass observation hives, while surrounding the entire building ran a six-foot-deep trench that led at one end to a stout wooden door. Opening this door revealed an underground laboratory containing a large copper vat, in which Hunter boiled down the bodies of animals, and at times even humans, to obtain their skeletons. The great cauldron would one day play a significant role in the most extraordinary of all his quests for specimens.

Hunter’s neighbors regarded their most flamboyant resident with unbridled curiosity, though they hurried past the sight, and stench, of a large whale bone, left over from one of his dissections, which lay discarded for years in a gutter.¹¹ Excited village children gawped at the extraordinary wild creatures in their incongruous pastoral setting. It has even been plausibly suggested that Hunter provided the model for the children’s book character Dr. Dolittle, the eccentric country physician whose fascination with natural history inspired him to become an animal doctor.¹² In his fictional home of Puddleby, John Dolittle kept exotic animals and built up friendships with traveling circus owners, just like Hunter. Likewise, Hunter on occasion treated animals belonging to his patients. He would ultimately be instrumental in founding the Veterinary College of London, forerunner to the Royal Veterinary College, when it was launched in 1791.¹³

For Hunter, his country menagerie fulfilled two essential purposes: It allowed him to observe living animals in natural surroundings and to perform investigations on animals both dead and alive. And as his growing London clientele brought him increasing income to indulge his passion for collecting, he spent more and more time among the bizarre flocks and weird beasts at his rural hideaway. He enjoyed watching his wild creatures from the windows of his study and even played with some of them. Listening to the eerie calls of a pair of leopards mating, he noted, “Their noise is a mew but not so loud & hoarse & have a gutteral or hollow sound when angry very strong.” On another occasion he was delighted to see a hawk and a pigeon living happily together in the same cage, and he wrote, “Thus Animals not chusing to devour or hurt those that they are acquainted with is of great service in the Animal System and the Effect is beautifull.”¹⁴

All his life, Hunter would retain the reverence for nature he had felt as a child. Despite performing many experiments on living dogs, he was particularly fond of his canine pets, and he admired the industry of the bees he studied for hours in the glass hives he had specially designed for the conservatory. He noted, obviously from painful experience, that a bee about to sting made a different noise “from that of the wings when coming home of a fine evening loaded with farina of honey; it is then a soft contented noise.” He even went so far as to compare this hum with the notes of a pianoforte, remarking that “it seemed to be the same sound with the lower A of the treble.”¹⁵ And on balmy summer evenings, as the bees returned to their hives, the cattle lowed in the fields, and the pigs snuffled in the yard, the scene seemed idyllic.

Life was not always so harmonious, however. His leopards on one occasion broke free from their chains and ran into the yard, where they attacked the dogs. The commotion was heard all around, and “the howling this produced, alarmed the whole neighbourhood,” Everard Home later related. ¹⁶ Without stopping to consider the risks, Hunter ran from the house and into the fray. Grabbing one leopard by the scruff of its neck as it was about to scale the wall into the village, he yanked its mate from the middle of the dog pack with the other hand. Then he carried both animals, struggling and squealing, back to their den before realizing how close he and the rest of the neighborhood had come to peril. As soon as he had secured the beasts, Home recorded, “he was so much agitated that he was in danger of fainting.” In another display of his muscular strength, Hunter enjoyed wrestling with a bull he kept. The animal, a “beautiful small bull,” was a present from Queen Charlotte in return for the donation of twenty-eight preparations, which Hunter had presented to create a miniature anatomical museum at the Royal Observatory, Kew, for the edification of the young princes and princesses. ¹⁷ But he obviously underestimated his combatant, for one day the bull threw him and was about to gore him, until a quick-thinking servant drove the beast off.¹⁸

Yet behind all the madcap antics with dangerous animals and the musical comparisons with the hum of bees lay a serious scientific intent. Hunter was among a long line of anatomists, dating back to earliest times, who studied animal bodies. Aristotle had dissected numerous animals, including whales, and since then many anatomists had used animals, dead and alive, to further their explorations. In his milestone anatomical works, Vesalius included a helpful drawing of a custom-made table on which live beasts could be secured during experiments.¹⁹ Among Hunter’s contemporaries, the Monros, father and son, in Edinburgh and Albrecht von Haller in Switzerland were all keen vivisectionists. As with other anatomists of the time, their research was intended to illuminate human anatomy and physiology; there was little interest in the internal structure of animals for its own sake. Only in France, where Buffon and Daubenton collaborated to produce their thirty-six-volume Histoire Naturelle, did anyone come close to Hunter’s single-minded mission to understand all natural life. ²⁰

At the same time, many naturalists were busy collecting and cataloging newly discovered forms of fauna and flora, either by risking their lives traveling to distant lands, like Solander and Banks, or by pottering around their own neighborhoods, like Gilbert White, who collected his specimens in Selborne, Hampshire. Generally, however, this passion for natural history was confined to describing the external appearances of known or new species and categorizing them to fit into a particular system of classification, principally from the late 1760s the binomial system invented by Linnaeus. And though many amateur naturalists built up large stores of plants and animals, these tended to be either random selections of stuffed skins and dried flowers or highly specialized collections of a particular species. The huge hoard Sir Hans Sloane left to the nation in 1753—forming the foundations of the British Museum, which opened six years later— comprised a gigantic jumble of stuffed animals, birds’ eggs, dried plants, fossils, and precious stones, with little semblance of order. Other collectors owned “cabinets of curiosities” containing a confusion of natural history exhibits, ethnic artifacts, and antiquities.

John Hunter’s explorations in natural history were radically different. ²¹ Initially, he had begun, like the Monros and Haller, examining animals largely to illuminate the human body. His early experiments injecting milk into dogs’ intestines were aimed at understanding how the human lymphatic system worked; when he cracked open hens’ eggs to examine the developing fetuses, he was keen to know how the human embryo grew. But his animal studies soon constituted an important pursuit in their own right. His chief aim was to discover general principles or rules governing all organic life. As he explained, “All animals must have certain general principles, or they would not be an Animal; and it is from the different combination of these principles that produce different animals.”²² His labors would make him a pioneer, though rarely recognized as such, in the discipline that would become established in the following century as biology.

The stirrings of this lifelong quest began early. When Hunter had tested the hearing of fish in Lisbon, it was not fish in particular that interested him, but the sense of hearing in all animal life. Refusing to accept other anatomists’ view that fish had no ears, he quickly established that they did indeed possess internal hearing organs, thereby confirming his beliefs about the function of hearing in general. He explained, “I am still inclined to consider whatever is uncommon in the structure of this organ in fishes as only a link in the chain of varieties displayed in its formation in different animals, descending from the most perfect to the most imperfect, in a regular progression.”²³ Everything, he was certain, fitted logically into a pattern.

We may observe that in natural things nothing stands alone, every thing in Nature having a relation or connection to some other natural production or productions and that each is composed of parts common to most others but differently arranged, and therefore in every natural product there is an appearance of an affinity in some of its parts to some other natural production because it has some of its parts in its composition; and where there are the greatest number of those affinities or parts as also the closer the connection or affinity between those of one production with those of another, the nearer are those allied.²⁴

But always a staunch believer in the power of visual evidence rather than the ephemeral quality of words, Hunter’s aim was most clearly to be seen in his collection. The human and animal preparations that he had moved into the fine rooms in the Jermyn Street house were no haphazard medley of curiosities, but an ordered display systematically exploring organic life. Similar or analogous parts from different animals and humans were grouped together. So differently sized eyeballs bobbed in alcohol on one shelf, while variously shaped kidneys floated in jars on another; digestive organs were displayed in one section and reproductive organs in another.²⁵ No other collection of its kind existed. And every time Hunter dissected an animal he had not seen before, his chief aim was to discover where it would fit into nature’s system—precisely how its particular organs mirrored or differed from those of similar species, how its internal structure slotted into an overarching pattern. From the 1760s onward, he began actively looking for similarities and variations among different species, the discovery of which, he believed, might explain the secrets of life itself.

No animal was too large or too small, too simple or too complex, for Hunter’s knife. One day might find him stooped over his bench searching for the brain in an earthworm, while another would see him wrestling with the stomach of an elephant. He dissected the most basic animal forms, such as polyps, and the most sophisticated, the human body. Mostly working without the aid of a microscope—for fear that it would distort reality— he observed, “The circulation of the insect is probably very slow, if we may judge of the whole class by the motion of the heart in the caterpillar. In the silk-worm, for instance, the heart beats only 34 in a minute.”²⁶ With incredible patience and dexterity, he dissected brains in leeches, worms, and centipedes, tongues in bees, and reproductive organs in silkworms.

Large mammals, however, could be equally challenging and just as entrancing. Opening a huge sperm whale on a barge on the Thames, standing on top of its blubbery carcass as he had in 1759, he noted that “the tongue was almost like a feather-bed.” With awe, he added, “The heart and aorta of the spermaceti whale appeared prodigious, being too large to be contained in a wide tub, the aorta measuring a foot in diameter. When we consider this as applied to the circulation and figure to ourselves that probably ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out at one stroke, and moved with immense velocity through a tube of a foot diameter, the whole idea fills the mind with wonder.”²⁷ Hunter’s poetical descriptions of whales would later be cited as inspiration for Moby-Dick. And even if Dr. Johnson informed the reading public that whales were fish, Hunter had no doubts about their position in the overall plan. After comparing their organs with those of other mammals in his collection, he remarked, “I shall always keep in view their analogy to land animals.” But impressed as he was by the grandeur of cetaceans, Hunter was just as fascinated by the worms he found in the whale’s intestines.

While similarities among normal forms of species were a compelling interest, abnormalities were just as absorbing. Hunter was intrigued by deviations from the norm, or “monsters” in contemporary language, and he avidly collected such peculiarities. Already by 1767, his collection included the brains of a calf with two heads, a pig with two bodies, a kitten with two mouths, and a creature he described as “the Elephant-Pig or Cyclops.” These he grouped together with a child born without a skull and an infant with spina bifida. He was equally bent on obtaining living examples of such abnormalities. At one point, he kept a lamb with three legs at his Earls Court farm.²⁸ Such oddities were a common obsession in eighteenth-century Britain. People flocked to see animals and human freaks at fairs and shows. But Hunter’s interest was more than curiosity. He realized that all animal life possessed an innate ability to become altered or deformed— his double lizard tails were a perfect example—and he was gradually coming to believe that this propensity for change might explain how life first developed.

As well as examining and collecting dead animals, Hunter devoted hours at Earls Court to experiments on living creatures. His interminable trials investigated every bodily function, including temperature, circulation, respiration, generation, and digestion, in every possible animal. In one series of experiments, he measured the body temperature of dogs, hens, fish, slugs, a rabbit, a carp, a viper, an ox, and “sleeping”—hibernating— dormice, as well as humans.²⁹ Initially, he used a standard mercury thermometer for these trials. Since its invention by Gabriel Fahrenheit in 1714, such instruments had been readily available from specialist instrument makers in London. But finding this too clumsy for his purposes, he commissioned his friend Jesse Ramsden, the royal instrument maker, to make him a smaller, more accurate model, just six inches long and less than one-sixth of an inch wide, with a sliding scale made of ivory. With this, he concluded that all warm-blooded animals have their own regular body heat, which varies when sleeping or awake.

Other experiments begun at Earls Court in the 1760s were designed to discover how bones grow. Having caught a chicken in the yard, he drilled two holes in one leg and fixed a piece of lead shot into each.³⁰ After a while, he killed the hen, cut off its leg, and measured the distance between the two pieces of shot. While the leg had grown more than three inches, the gap was exactly the same. His trial suggested, correctly, that limb bones grow by accumulating material at the outer ends, rather than universally throughout their structure. Next, he repeated the experiment on a piglet. When it was slaughtered at full size, the results replicated those with the hen. Still, this failed adequately to explain how bone tissue grows and develops. For this, Hunter selected two more pigs and fed them with madder root, traditionally used as a vegetable dye, for a fortnight. He was not the first to use the plant for such experiments. A surgeon named John Belchier had reported to the Royal Society in 1736 that eating madder stained pigs’ bones red. A few years later, a French researcher, Henri-Louis du Hamel du Monceau, had used this effect to establish that bones grow widthways like trees, by the addition of layer upon layer, as well as lengthways in layers added at the ends, although his conclusions were still hotly disputed. Hunter killed one of his two pigs at the end of the fortnight, while the other was fed for a further two weeks on a normal diet before being killed for comparison. Dissection of the bones of this second pig revealed red and white strata in certain parts, confirming du Hamel’s theory that bone grows layer upon layer. Other parts of the bone remained white, however, suggesting that old bone matter had been absorbed. Hunter named this simultaneous absorbing and depositing of matter the “modelling process.”

Though the spacious grounds at Earls Court allowed Hunter to observe numerous animals over long periods, other people’s creatures were equally rewarding to watch. Hunter described a zebra that had been imported to England by Lord Clive, the hero of conquests in India, who had fallen from grace since returning home. After attempting in vain to persuade the female zebra to mate with an ass, Clive had ordered the donkey to be painted with black and white stripes; suitably embellished, “she received him very readily,” Hunter recorded.³¹ His observations would later be cited by Charles Darwin as part of the explanation of his theory of sexual selection in The Descent of Man (1871).

Generation was an abiding interest, not only in the pregnant human corpses Hunter had dissected in Covent Garden but in all manner of animals, too. One winter in the late 1760s, Hunter caught six male house sparrows and compared the size of their testes as the mating season progressed. Preserving their tiny bodies to show the tenfold increase in testicle size from the dimension of a pinhead to those of a marble, he recorded with admiration, “If we compare their size in January with what it is in April, it hardly appears possible that such a wonderful change could have taken place during so short a period.”³²

But in the late summer of 1768, with Cook, Banks, and Solander heading for the South Pacific, Hunter had his sights set on rather more exotic creatures than house sparrows. He would have to be patient. It would be three years before the adventurers returned to England with their treasures.

Meanwhile, Hunter’s collecting passion was proving an incessant drain on his resources. While some specimens and animals were gifts, he expended large sums procuring the anatomical curiosities he craved from dealers, circus owners, and auctioneers. At the same time, his expanding Earls Court establishment required an increasing number of staff to tend its animal population. There was his future wife to consider, too: As an assiduous society hostess, she would certainly expect generous household support when she settled in the house on Jermyn Street. Although Hunter was making his way as an up-and-coming surgeon, his income from patients’ fees was still insufficient to keep pace with his escalating expenses. On several occasions, he mortgaged land at Earls Court to raise funds for his ventures.

Unlike William, who was building a vast collection of coins, books, and paintings as a solid investment, John had not the slightest inclination to generate a profit. All he earned, he spent. And he regarded his routine work, pandering to the whims of malingering rich clients, principally as a way of fueling his collecting habit. On one occasion, he wearily told an assistant, “Well . . . I must go and earn this damned guinea, or I shall be sure to want it tomorrow.”³³ When one of Hunter’s friends, the physician George Baker, was asked by a mutual acquaintance whether the anatomist would appreciate some form of edible delicacy as a birthday present, Baker replied, “He cares not what he eats or drinks and I am sure that a curious case or some anatomical curiosity would be more agreeable to him than all the wine and all the venison in the country.”³⁴ It was flesh for his dissecting table, not meat for the dining table, alcohol for his preparation bottles, not wine for his palate, that Hunter desired. Nevertheless, his expensive lifestyle and impending marriage made it imperative that he augment his earnings. And so, when a vacancy arose at St. George’s Hospital in November, it was an opportunity Hunter could not afford to miss.

On December 9, 1768, the boardroom of St. George’s Hospital was crammed full. More than 160 governors had turned up for the meeting to elect a new full-time surgeon. Bishops, lords, dukes, and other pillars of Georgian society took their seats to cast their votes for one of the two candidates: the junior surgeon David Bayford, who had dutifully served his apprenticeship at St. George’s, and John Hunter, the controversial maverick, who had not treated a patient at the hospital since his brief stint as a house surgeon twelve years earlier. As far as the three current members of the surgical staff were concerned, there was no contest: Bayford was a St. George’s man, schooled in the St. George’s traditions, and the position was morally his. Although three of the four physicians on the staff may have been equivocal, there is no doubt that the fourth member, Donald Monro, older brother of the Hunters’ bitter rival Alexander Monro, Jr., would have rallied to Bayford, too.

But the clinical staff had not reckoned with John Hunter—or rather, with his influential brother, William. Since becoming governors themselves, both brothers had diligently attended board meetings during 1768.³⁵ Through these gatherings, and William’s contacts with the rich and powerful in Georgian society, the brothers had become friendly with fellow governors, such as the actor David Garrick and the artist Joshua Reynolds, both of whom made sure to turn out for the St. George’s vote. This was no casual favor from Reynolds, for on the same day he had three crucial meetings with fellow artists in order to prepare for an audience with George III the next day to establish the Royal Academy of Arts.³⁶ The kindness was not wasted. Hunter garnered 114 votes, to Bayford’s 42.

At forty, having gained his surgical diploma only five months earlier and never having completed a traditional hospital training, but with more anatomical experience than the rest of the hospital’s staff put together, Hunter had finally secured his first proper surgeon’s job. It was the beginning of a steady rise in his prospects. A staff surgeon’s job brought no salary—all hospital appointments were honorary—but it still promised a substantial boost in income. Not only could hospital surgeons earn fees from teaching apprentices and house pupils; their private practice benefited from their leap in status. Moreover, Hunter now had access to a ready pool of patients on which to practice his art and perform his experiments. His patients at St. George’s were quickly recruited as human guinea pigs in his tireless research program.

Conflict was inevitable. Hunter’s dogged determination to question accepted doctrines, his fascination with innovation and experiment, and his commitment to founding surgical practice on sound scientific principles were anathema to his fellow surgeons at St. George’s. For his part, Hunter was never one to employ tact or diplomacy to win friends and influence colleagues. When offered resistance, like the fierce little bull he kept at Earls Court, he was more likely to put his head down and charge straight at his opponents.

For the moment at least, an uneasy peace prevailed. Hunter attended the hospital to admit emergency patients on his allotted day, completed his ward rounds according to the agreed rota, and patched up casualties in the operating theater as best he could. And if the surgeons at St. George’s kept their own counsel for the time being, Hunter’s surgical skills were certainly in demand elsewhere in the capital. On October 21 of the following year, he was called out urgently to help perform a rare and exceedingly risky emergency operation.³⁷ Twenty-three-year-old Martha Rhodes had gone into labor at her home in Holborn, but at just four four and with severe deformities in her spine and hips, the delivery was going badly. The midwife had quickly discerned that her patient’s contorted frame would make a natural delivery exceptionally difficult. In accordance with common practice when births were progressing poorly, she had sent for a medical man, William Cooper, for advice. Equally at a loss as to how to help, Cooper called in a bevy of colleagues for a bedside conference.

Altogether, six physicians and five surgeons crowded around Martha’s bed in the cramped and dark room. An examination confirmed what the midwife had already suspected: Martha’s pelvis was too narrow for her to give birth naturally. Surgeons and physicians were unanimous. The only chance of survival for both mother and baby was a cesarean section, and poor Martha “cheerfully consented” to the operation. Henry Thomson, a surgeon at the London Hospital, agreed to perform the surgery. John Hunter, with his unsurpassed knowledge of the anatomy of the pregnant womb, was his assistant. None of the medical men gathered around Martha’s bed had ever performed or witnessed such a perilous procedure before, and when Thomson hurriedly skimmed through the surgical texts he kept at home, he found very little help there, either. All would have heard reports of successful cesarean operations, but these were vague, unauthenticated stories, almost in the realm of folklore, and certainly lacked any useful technical advice.

Cesarean operations were undoubtedly carried out in ancient times, but usually posthumously, when women died in labor.³⁸ Although the term was widely believed to have emanated from the manner of Julius Caesar’s birth, the Roman emperor had certainly not been born by this method, for his mother was still alive many years after his birth. On the extremely rare occasions when the operation was performed on living women, few, if any, survived. Since then, accounts of cesarean sections had circulated, with varying reports of success. In 1500, a Swiss farm laborer had reputedly performed a cesarean on his own wife, who survived to give birth to five more children. In Ireland in 1738, a midwife had reportedly performed a successful operation on a woman who had been in labor for twelve days; the midwife had held the wound together with her hands while a neighbor ran to fetch needle and thread for the stitches. There were even stories of women who, in desperation, had cut open their own wombs during difficult labors. But there had been no accounts, not even folktales, of surgeons performing successful cesarean sections in Britain.

Thomson and Hunter were undeterred. Dosed with opium, Martha Rhodes was placed on a table, her head on a pillow, as Thomson took up his knife. With physicians and surgeons craning to see, he made a six-inch-long incision in her belly, then opened the womb to reveal the baby curled inside. One of the physicians yanked the child out by its feet, whereupon it “cried as heartily as children commonly do.” Now Hunter pushed the woman’s intestines out of the way while Thomson swiftly stitched the wound. Throughout the grisly procedure, Martha barely complained. As Cooper later recorded, “She behaved with surprizing fortitude during the whole process, lost very little blood, and seemed to be most of all sensible to pain when the needles were passing through the peritonaeum, especially on the right side of the wound.”

Afterward, however, things took a turn for the worse. Martha declined and died five hours later, most probably from internal bleeding. Her child, who had seemed initially healthy, had severe brain damage and died two days later. Hardly able to refuse the persuasive appeals of eleven eminent medical men, the grieving family consented to an autopsy and Martha was dissected in the presence of another large audience, this time including William Hunter, who reported details to the Royal Society. John Hunter would perform the operation for a second time, in 1774, with a degree more success.³⁹ This time, the baby survived, though the mother still expired. It would be several more decades before a cesarean section was performed by a surgeon in Britain—by James Barlow, in Blackburn in 1793, assisted by one of the Hunter brothers’ early pupils, Charles White—after which the woman survived. Even then the operation was carried out without the aid of either pain relief or antiseptics.

Demand for Hunter’s presence at postmortems continued unabated. In December of 1769, Hunter was called out by a friend, the physician John Pringle, to dissect a sixteen-year-old youth who had died of a fever. ⁴⁰ After watching Hunter saw open the skull of his former patient, Pringle was gratified to observe that the boy’s brain appeared diseased, just as he had diagnosed. But as Hunter continued to remove and examine the youth’s organs with his usual thoroughness, Pringle was baffled to see that the boy’s stomach had a huge hole at one end. Convinced that his patient had not suffered any digestive complaint, Pringle questioned his friend on the organ’s appearance. Hunter had seen the same effect many times in his twenty-one years of dissecting bodies. At first, he, too, had assumed the gaping holes in the stomach wall were connected to the cause of death, but having witnessed a similar phenomenon in those who had died a violent death but had previously been in good health, he had since surmised that the damage was due to the solvent power of the stomach itself.

Although the French naturalist René Réaumur had discovered gastric acid in animals’ intestines in 1752, intense debate over how digestion occurred continued. Rival anatomists argued over whether the process was caused by heat, muscle pulverization, or a chemical reaction.

Hunter was in no such doubt. Pressed by Pringle to commit his thoughts to paper in 1772, in only his second communication to the Royal Society, he presented views that were lucid and decisive. Pointing out the clinical importance of distinguishing appearances in the dead body as a result of disease from those due to natural postmortem changes, he explained that after death the digestive powers of the stomach acted on the body just as they had previously done on food. “These appearances throw considerable light on the principles of digestion,” he informed the fellows; “they show that it is not mechanical power, nor contraction of the stomach, nor heat, but something secreted in the coats of the stomach, which is thrown into this cavity.” ⁴¹ This “gastric juice,” as he called it, was an acid, “a little saltish or brackish to the taste,” he added.

Hunter’s shelves were filling up fast. Before long, the youth’s preserved stomach was joined by the aorta of an old campaigner, Maj. Gen. Robert Armiger. At sixty-eight, the experienced soldier had married a woman of forty, and after an evening’s celebrations in March 1770, he had taken her home to consummate the relationship. But the wedding-night excitement was all too much for the veteran of heavy battles, and within half an hour of retiring to bed, he suddenly died. Called in to dissect the body, Hunter confirmed the general had suffered a heart attack, and he confided in his casebooks, “It is not known whether or not he was taken ill in the Act of Consummation.”⁴² Hunter’s interest was not prurient; he simply knew that obtaining the body of someone who had died in the act of copulation was a rare occurrence indeed and might feasibly shed light on the physiology of generation. Accordingly, Hunter dissected the general’s sexual organs, noting that his penis was “very large, & almost half erected” and that the sperm-carrying vessels were “full of semen.”

While one day saw Hunter laboring over a naked corpse with a smile on its face, another found him examining the carcasses of peculiar-looking beasts newly arrived on home shores. One such was the nilgai, or “nyl-ghau,” which had first been brought to Britain from India in 1767. A pair of the bull-like creatures with their distinctively blue coats had been sent to Lord Clive as a present. The following year, a second pair was donated to Queen Charlotte, another enthusiastic menagerie owner, who was happy to oblige when her faithful male midwife, William Hunter, asked to borrow the animals. William kept the beasts in the stables at his new home in Great Windmill Street. He even had one of the curious animals, with its goatishly small head and tiny horns stuck incongruously on its robust, muscular body, painted by one of his artist friends, George Stubbs, who was fast becoming famous for his animal pictures.⁴³

As he watched the gentle creatures, which licked his hand when he fed them, William suspected the nilgai might be a hitherto-unknown species. ⁴⁴ He knew this question could only be settled by one person, his brother John, and only then by dissecting the dead animal. So when, shortly afterward and rather conveniently, one of the pair died, William obtained permission from Queen Charlotte for John to work on the beast. Just from examining its teeth and digestive system alone, John was convinced the nilgai was indeed a distinct species. While William reported the findings to the Royal Society, adding another paper to his name, John skipped home to Jermyn Street with his booty—the skeleton of the creature for his collection.

Hunter now knew that before long even more exotic creatures would be in his hands, for news of the Endeavour’s arrival in Java in October 1770, after circling the islands of New Zealand and charting the western coast of New Holland, as Australia was then known, had reached London. “The Naturalists write with great spirits,” Pringle reported to Haller, “& say they are loaded with new plants & other natural productions.” ⁴⁵ Waiting in eager anticipation of the new species he hoped to examine, that same month Hunter found a fellow enthusiast to share his passion for the natural world.

Edward Jenner, a vicar’s son from Berkeley, Gloucestershire, enrolled as a pupil at St. George’s Hospital that October and immediately took up residence as Hunter’s first house pupil.⁴⁶ Well mannered, impeccably dressed, and gifted in poetry and music, the twenty-one-year-old Jenner might have seemed more suitable a companion for Hunter’s talented young fiancée than for his brash, bombastic teacher. But in spite of the age gap and their divergent cultural interests, Hunter and Jenner were kindred spirits. Having lost his father, like Hunter, as a child, Jenner had spent his spare time as a youth hunting, as Hunter had, for wildlife in the surrounding countryside. After having been apprenticed to a local surgeon since the age of thirteen, Jenner came to London to complete his medical education. As Hunter’s pupil, he walked the wards at St. George’s, assisted as his “dresser” in the operating theater, and accompanied him on visits to his wealthy clients in their West End homes. But his most productive and pleasurable hours were spent at Hunter’s side in the Jermyn Street house they now shared, and at Hunter’s Earls Court retreat, exploring human corpses, examining the bodies of rare animals, and experimenting on living creatures.

From the start, the inquiring young student revered and adored his charismatic mentor, who fostered his interest in natural history and taught him to think for himself. It was Hunter’s doctrine—of observation, experiment, and application—that Jenner would faithfully follow when, nearly thirty years later, in 1796, he tested the smallpox vaccine. Not only would Jenner’s innovation save millions of lives; it would become the only medical therapy ever to eradicate a disease completely from the face of the earth.⁴⁷ Hunter was equally enchanted by his industrious pupil, who shared his love of nature and novelty. Jenner would always be not just his first but also his favorite disciple. So, as the Endeavour finally approached the English Channel at the end of its three-year world tour, both Jenner and Hunter were waiting impatiently to gain first sight of its haul of natural treasures.

They were not alone. Since hearing that Cook’s ship was on its way home from Java, every naturalist in Europe had scanned the newspapers for details of the daring expedition’s discoveries. When at last the Endeavour anchored off Deal on July 12, 1771, nobody was disappointed. The ship’s holds were crammed to bursting with a bounty of seeds, dried plants, bottled marine creatures, and preserved animals of varieties never seen in Europe before. Chests of gold plundered from Spanish merchant ships could scarcely have aroused more excitement. It was a collector’s dream. The adventurers had brought back no fewer than fourteen hundred new plant species and more than a thousand new species of animals, including a handful of mammals, more than a hundred birds, over 240 fish, and assorted mollusks, insects, and marine creatures.⁴⁸ It would take twelve years to classify the haul.

Hastening to welcome his friends, Hunter immediately recommended that his talented new pupil help Banks and Solander catalog their finds. Most were destined for Banks’s own collection, with a few choice items to go to the British Museum, but there were generous pickings for Hunter, too. Among the preserved new animals he added to his collection were a sea pen, a simple aquatic animal, from Rio de Janeiro; sharks’ eggs and eels from the South Seas; a mole rat and a zorilla, or striped polecat, from the Cape of Good Hope; and part of a giant squid.⁴⁹ But most astonishing of all was the peculiar gray animal that Banks had named, with his limited understanding of native dialects, a “kangooroo,” or “kangaru.” The ship’s crew had first sighted the curious creature—“an animal as large as a greyhound of a mouse colour and very swift”—while repairing their vessel on the east coast of New Holland on June 22, 1770. ⁵⁰ Banks saw the animal for the first time a few days later. The following month, the ship’s second lieutenant, John Gore, shot a large male, and Banks recorded in his journal, “To compare it to any European animal would be impossible as it has not the least resemblance to any one I have seen.” The next day, the kangaroo was served up for dinner and “proved excellent meat.” It was enough to make a comparative anatomist weep; the kangaroo was one of many exotic creatures the crew devoured in their hunger for fresh meat. A second kangaroo fell victim to Gore’s shotgun a few days later, and on July 29, one of Banks’s greyhounds caught a small female. The flesh having been long since consumed, Banks had brought back the skins and skulls of the extraordinary creatures. Back in London, he commissioned George Stubbs to paint a picture of the marsupial using a stuffed skin and a little imagination. It was the first portrayal of a kangaroo seen by Western eyes. He gave his friend John Hunter one of the skulls.⁵¹

It was not much to go on, but Hunter still hoped he could tell something about the strange animal Banks had described by examining its teeth and jaws and comparing them with species he had already dissected. He was confounded and had to admit that “the teeth did not accord with those of any one single class of animals I was acquainted with, therefore I was obliged to wait with patience till I could get a whole.”

It would be almost two more decades before Hunter could fulfill his ambition, when John White, surgeon general to the first British colony in New South Wales, sent back a treasure trove of preserved animals in 1788. As well as various birds, fish, and insects, a dingo, a kangaroo rat, and several possums, it included several complete kangaroos. The task of describing the mammals for White’s subsequent book, Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales, published in 1790, fell to Hunter.⁵²

At last, Hunter was able to explore the entire anatomy of the kangaroo, to examine the female marsupial’s unusual double reproductive organs and appreciate its peculiar method of nurturing its young in pouches. He was certain that the species Banks and Cook had discovered were unique to the antipodean islands, noting, “They are, upon the whole, like no other that we yet know of,” and stressed that their anatomy showed particular adaptations to their environment. This realization that there were species in parts of the world unlike those anywhere else provided yet another piece to slot into the big puzzle of how life on earth had developed. His descriptions of kangaroos and other creatures from Cook’s first voyage would eventually appear in his extensive work of comparative anatomy, Observations on the Animal Oeconomy (1786); he dedicated the book to Banks.

The summer of 1771 was a busy one. Jenner and Solander were immersed in cataloging the Endeavour’s haul and Hunter was finally going ahead with his marriage. The fact that his three-year experiment on venereal disease had ended the previous year may or may not have been the spur. No doubt his new hospital post and the two hundred pounds he received in 1771 for his treatise on teeth helped to boost his suitability for marriage.⁵³ And strangely, after waiting seven years, he was suddenly in a great hurry to arrange the wedding. A marriage license was obtained on July 21. That evening, John dashed off a hurried note to his brother William: “To morrow morning, at eight o clock at St James’s Church I enter into the Holy State of Matrimony. As that is a ceremony which you are not particularly fond of, I will not make a point of having your company there.”⁵⁴ William, who believed wedlock was incompatible with a career devoted to anatomy—he had dissolved his partnership with his then assistant, William Hewson, the previous year chiefly on the grounds that he had married— did not attend the ceremony.

John Hunter and Anne Home were married on Monday, July 22, 1771, with her parents as witnesses; he was forty-three and she was twenty-nine. ⁵⁵ Having returned to London just over a week earlier, Banks and Cook were home in time to enjoy the ceremony. According to one tale, the travelers not only attended but gave the couple a wedding present of some hickory wood that they had cut down in New South Wales.⁵⁶ John had it made into a set of dining chairs for his “Anny.” Sparing a few days from Hunter’s busy schedule, the couple spent a honeymoon “out of Town,” most probably at Earls Court.

One old family friend who had been unable to attend the wedding was Tobias Smollett. The long-suffering writer was ailing in his adopted home of Italy that summer, and on September 17, two months after the publication of his most acclaimed novel, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, he died. Earlier in the year, in a moment of foreboding, he had promised John his body after death to display in his collection, declaring in a letter from Livorno, “You shall receive my poor carcase in a box, after I am dead, to be placed among your rarities.”⁵⁷ Yet despite his offer, Smollett escaped dissection. When he died, his wife was either unwilling or unable to ship his corpse from Italy.

There would be plenty more bodies, both human and animal, to fill Smollett’s place. And as Anne looked out of the bedroom window of her new country home at Earls Court on the rare and varied creatures grazing her English country garden, she could have been in no doubt of the extraordinary life that lay ahead. Returning to their town house on Jermyn Street, with its elegant rooms filled with preserved organs, heads, bones, and fetuses, it was abundantly clear that she had married an extraordinary man.