John Hunter
John Hunter - A Famous Scottish Anatomist
John Hunter (1728 - 1793) Receiving very little schooling, John Hunter obtained employment in his step-brother's cabinet-making businees in Glasgow, and became manager at the age of 17. He was skilful in the use of tools and interested in surgery, and he then rode to London on horseback to become assistant to his elder brother William Hunter, who was qualifying for a doctor. John Hunter studied surgery at Chelsea and St Bartholomew's hospital, and went to Oxford to complete his studies from 1755 to 1756. He became a house-surgeon at St George's hospital London in 1756, and surgeon in 1768. During this period he accompanied expeditions to Belle Ile in 1761 and Portugal in 1762, and opened a private practice in 1763. He also began his researches in comparative anatomy, and kept dissecting instruments and wild animals at a house in Earl's Court in London. In 1767 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. From 1770 to 1772 he lived in Jermyn Street, where he had Edward Jenner as a house-pupil. He began giving lectures on surgery in 1773, and was appointed surgeon-extraordinary to George III in 1776, and surgeon-general in 1790.
Among Hunter's important discoveries was that embryos of mammals pass through stages of resemblance to lower animals, a phenomenon later to be used in support of Darwin's theory by E. Haeckel. Another was that the so-called 'cold-blooded' animals (fishes, amphibians, reptiles) have a variable blood-temperature which is in fact slightly warmer than their surroundings. As a surgeon he specialised in the heart and circulatory system with particular attention to the sense-organs, observing that the eyes, for example, consistently give sensations of light even when stimulated in unorthodox ways, such ass by a punch. He was a pioneer in grafting animal tissues, and succeeded in grafting a cock's spur and part of a chicken's leg on to the comb of another fowl.
During his life he made a collection of more than 10,000 anatomical specimens, many of them of soft tissues preserved in spirit. They included the skeletons of remarkable dwarfs and giants, one being the celebrated Patrick Cotter, an Irihman who stood 8 feet 7 3/4 inches tall. To exhibit his specimens Hunter built an anotomical museum in Leicester Square in London in 1784-1785, but they were later bought for the nation and presented to the Royal College of Surgeons. Hunters principle works included Observations on Certain Parts of the Animal Oeconomy (1786), On the Venereal Disease (1786) and Treatise on the Blood: Inflammation and Gunshot Wounds (1794).
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