William Hunter

William Hunter 1718-83, Scottish physician. He was famous as a lecturer, as London's leading obstetrician, as professor of anatomy and later president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and as head of a school and museum of anatomy where many noted men were trained. He bequeathed his valuable anatomical collection to the Univ. of Glasgow. His works include the important Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (1774).

Bibliography: See biography by C. Illingworth (1967); study by R. H. Fox (1901); memoir by G. C. Peachey (1924).

Hunter, William (1718–83) and John (1728–93). Scottish anatomists. Intended for the church, William turned to medicine, studying at Edinburgh and London before establishing a private anatomy school in Covent Garden (1746) with dissection on the Paris model. Abandoning surgery for obstetrics, he became physician to Queen Charlotte and delivered all her children. A hard worker, clear lecturer, cultured though frugal, William formed a notable anatomical and pathological collection, and published On the Human Gravid Uterus (1774). John, blunt and irascible, no book-lover but a passionate though disciplined enquirer, joined his elder brother in London (1748) before receiving surgical tuition from Cheselden and Pott. After army service in Portugal, he practised surgery with distinction while continuing investigations and experimentation into human and comparative anatomy; granted a royal appointment (1776), he has become regarded as ‘the founder of scientific surgery’. The brothers' importance rests not only upon their anatomical discoveries but on their teaching methods which so influenced the early 19th-cent. teaching hospital entrepreneurs, linking structure with function and underpinning diagnostic accuracy by knowledge of physiology and pathology. Their personal estrangement is mirrored by William's collections now resting at Glasgow University, John's at the Royal College of Surgeons (London).

A. S. Hargreaves