John Hunter (13 February 1728 – 16 October 1793) was a Scottish surgeon, one of the most distinguished scientists and surgeons of his day. He was an early advocate of careful observation and scientific methods in medicine. He was a teacher of, and collaborator with, Edward Jenner, pioneer of the smallpox vaccine. His wife, Anne Hunter (née Home), was a poet, some of whose poems were set to music by Joseph Haydn. He learned anatomy by assisting his elder brother William with dissections in William's anatomy school in Central London, starting in 1748, and quickly became an expert in anatomy. He spent some years as an Army surgeon, worked with the dentist James Spence conducting tooth transplants, and in 1764 set up his own anatomy school in London. He built up a collection of living animals whose skeletons and other organs he prepared as anatomical specimens, eventually amassing nearly 14,000 preparations demonstrating the anatomy of humans and other vertebrates, including 3,000+ animals. Hunter became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1787. The Hunterian Society of London was named in his honour, and the Hunterian Museum in London preserves his name and his collection of anatomical specimens.
Early life Hunter was born at Long Calderwood to Agnes Paul (c.1685–1751) and John Hunter (1662/3–1741), the youngest of their ten children. Three of Hunter's siblings (one of whom had also been named John) died of illness before he was born. An elder brother was William Hunter, the anatomist. As a youth, he showed little talent, and helped his brother-in-law as a cabinet-maker.
Education and training When nearly 21 years old, he visited William in London, where his brother had become an admired teacher of anatomy. Hunter started as his assistant in dissections (1748), and was soon running the practical classes on his own. It has recently been alleged that Hunter's brother William, and his brother's former tutor William Smellie, were responsible for the deaths of many women whose corpses were used for their studies on pregnancy. Hunter is alleged to have been connected to these deaths since at the time he was acting as his brother's assistant. However, persons who have studied life in Georgian London agree that the number of pregnant women who died in London during the years of Hunter's and Smellie's work was not particularly high for that locality and time; the prevalence of pre-eclampsia – a common condition affecting 10% of all pregnancies, and one which is easily treated today, but for which no treatment was known in Hunter's time – would more than suffice to explain a mortality rate that seems suspiciously high to 21st-century readers. In The Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures, published in 1774, Hunter provides case histories for at least four of the subjects illustrated. Hunter heavily researched blood while bloodletting patients with various diseases. This helped him develop his theory that inflammation was a bodily response to disease, and was not itself pathological. Hunter studied under William Cheselden at Chelsea Hospital and Percival Pott at St Bartholomew's Hospital. Hunter also studied with Marie Marguerite Bihéron, a famous anatomist and wax modeller teaching in London; some of the illustrations in his text were likely hers. After qualifying, he worked at St George's Hospital as an assistant surgeon from 1756, then as a surgeon from 1768. Hunter was commissioned as an Army surgeon in 1760 and was a staff surgeon on an expedition to the French island of Belle Île in 1761, then served in 1762 with the British Army.
Post-Army career Hunter left the Army in 1763, and spent at least five years working in partnership with James Spence, a well-known London dentist. Hunter set up his own anatomy school in London in 1764 and started in private surgical practice.
Self-experimentation Hunter was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767. At this time he was considered the leading authority on venereal diseases, and believed that gonorrhoea and syphilis were caused by a single pathogen. Living in an age when physicians frequently experimented on themselves, he was the subject of an often-repeated legend claiming that he had inoculated himself with gonorrhea, using a needle that was unknowingly contaminated with syphilis. When he contracted both syphilis and gonorrhoea, he claimed it proved his erroneous theory that they were the same underlying venereal disease. The experiment, reported in Hunter's A Treatise on the Venereal Diseases (part 6 section 2, 1786), does not indicate self-experimentation; this experiment was most likely performed on a third party. Hunter championed the treatment of gonorrhoea and syphilis with mercury and cauterization. Because of Hunter's reputation, knowledge concerning the true nature of gonorrhoea and syphilis was set back, and his theory was not proved to be wrong until 51 years later through research by French physician Philippe Ricord.
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