40 Fun Facts About John Hunter (Surgeon)

Charles Byrne, the 'Irish Giant', asked to be buried where to keep his corpse from surgeon John Hunter?

At sea was where Byrne wanted his lead coffin sunk, beyond any anatomist's reach, but Hunter had the body snatched on the road to Margate. The museum retired the skeleton from display only in 2023.

John Hunter's Leicester Square house reputedly inspired the home of which Victorian fictional character?

Dr Jekyll's creator, Robert Louis Stevenson, published the tale in 1886. Hunter lived in the smart house on the square and did his dissecting in a second house on the street behind.

Which fictional character created by Hugh Lofting appears to be partly inspired by surgeon John Hunter?

Doctor Dolittle talks to animals, and Hunter lived among them. He kept a large collection of living creatures to study, and prepared their skeletons and organs as specimens once they died.

What killed John Hunter in 1793, moments after a colleague contradicted him at a hospital board meeting?

A heart attack felled him in the next room. He had long said his life was in the hands of anyone who chose to annoy him, because anger had brought on his chest pains for twenty years.

Edward Jenner, John Hunter's pupil and lodger from 1770, later created a vaccine against which disease?

Smallpox was one of the great killers of Jenner's day. He and Hunter exchanged letters on natural history for the rest of Hunter's life, and in 1775 Hunter begged him to come and lecture with him.

At his country house, surgeon John Hunter once subdued which pair of escaped animals while unarmed?

Two leopards broke loose and Hunter got both back under control without a weapon. He liked his animals fierce, though a small bull given to him by Queen Charlotte once knocked him flat.

What became of John Hunter's unpublished manuscripts once Everard Home had used them in his own papers?

They were burned, it is supposed, to hide how much Home had borrowed from his brother-in-law. About half survive only because Hunter's assistant William Clift had already made copies.

Joseph Banks gave John Hunter which Australian animals, brought home from Captain Cook's first voyage?

Kangaroos reached Hunter because travellers everywhere knew he wanted rarities. By his death his museum held nearly 14,000 specimens from more than 500 species of plants and animals.

In 1859 John Hunter's coffin was moved from a parish church vault to which famous London landmark?

Westminster Abbey took him after the naturalist Frank Buckland searched foul-aired vaults for weeks to find the coffin. Hunter lies in the nave, close to the playwright Ben Jonson.

The young John Hunter was popular with London's 'resurrection men', who sold anatomists what?

Dead bodies dug from fresh graves were how anatomy teachers got most of their subjects. In those years Hunter loved lively company and the theatre, and went by Jack.

John Hunter was born on a farm at Long Calderwood, in which part of the British Isles?

Scotland sent London both Hunter brothers. William, ten years older, went south first and ran the anatomy school where John, the youngest of ten children, learned to dissect.

In a 1775 letter, John Hunter told Edward Jenner to stop merely thinking about a puzzle and do what?

Try the experiment, he urged, rather than guess. Hunter lived by the rule, keeping a flock of geese for fifteen years simply to watch how birds develop inside their eggs.

John Hunter wrongly taught that gonorrhoea and which other disease were two forms of a single infection?

Syphilis and gonorrhoea were not shown to be separate until the French physician Philippe Ricord tested the idea about half a century later. Hunter's reputation had kept the mistake alive.

John Hunter helped a linen draper's wife conceive by which procedure, an early human case?

Artificial insemination was first recorded in a dog, by the Italian Lazzaro Spallanzani. Hunter advised the couple, the husband used a syringe, and Everard Home reported the case in 1799.

John Hunter argued that the dog is one species with the jackal and which other animal?

The wolf, the jackal and the dog were one species, Hunter argued in an essay added to his book on the animal economy in 1792. The wolf is now known to be the dog's wild ancestor.

John Hunter's first major book, in 1771, was a natural history of which part of the human body?

The teeth drew Hunter in during years of work with the London dentist James Spence, moving them from one mouth to another. One patient said three such transplants lasted six years.

Poems by Anne Hunter, John Hunter's wife, were set as English songs by which visiting Austrian composer?

Haydn used her words for at least nine of his fourteen songs in English. Anne also hosted some of the most enjoyable salons in London, not always to her husband's taste.

In January 1776 John Hunter was appointed surgeon extraordinary to which reigning British monarch?

George III was king, and Hunter went on to serve his army too. Made surgeon general in 1790, he began promoting army surgeons on experience and merit instead of patronage.

John Hunter's aneurysm operation grew out of an artery he tied in which Richmond Park animal?

A deer's half-grown antler went cold when Hunter tied its artery, yet within two weeks it was warm and growing again. Smaller vessels had taken over, so he dared to tie a patient's artery.

Which double Booker Prize winner wrote The Giant, O'Brien, a novel about John Hunter and Charles Byrne?

Hilary Mantel first planned a big realistic novel about Hunter alone, then found the giant taking over. She casts the surgeon as cold new science and Byrne as a teller of old tales.

For venereal disease, John Hunter championed cauterisation and doses of which poisonous metal?

Mercury was what Hunter prescribed in his 1786 treatise on venereal disease, a book he had printed in his own house. He had studied the subject for many years before publishing.

The brass over John Hunter's grave, laid by the Royal College of Surgeons, calls him the founder of what?

Scientific surgery is the brass's claim, because Hunter held that operating must rest on knowing how the body repairs itself. He called an operation an admission that the art had failed.

Which painter, first president of the Royal Academy, caught John Hunter daydreaming in a famous portrait?

Joshua Reynolds was getting nowhere with a restless sitter until Hunter drifted into a daydream. The painter turned his canvas upside down and began again on the spot.

John Hunter built a country house with a menagerie in which then-rural district, now part of west London?

Earl's Court gave him two acres for cages and dissecting rooms. The garden pond was edged with skulls, and in it he tried to make oysters grow pearls to order.

John Hunter, a nervous lecturer, steadied himself at the start of each course with a dose of which drug?

Laudanum, a tincture of opium, calmed a man who never got over his dread of public speaking. He read his lectures from a script, and his classes seldom drew more than thirty students.

John Hunter kept asking his former pupil Edward Jenner to send which small mammals for hibernation studies?

Hedgehogs so absorbed Hunter that he mentioned them even while consoling Jenner over a failed romance. Forget her, he advised, and promised to keep his friend busy with the animals instead.

Six years after John Hunter died, who paid £15,000 for his museum of nearly 14,000 specimens?

The British government paid up in 1799 after years of hesitation, then offered the collection to the Royal College of Physicians, which turned it down. The surgeons' college said yes.

In 1909 Harvey Cushing found that John Hunter's 'Irish Giant' had suffered a tumour of which gland?

The pituitary sits in a hollow of the skull that Cushing found enlarged in Byrne's bones. In 2011 the giant's DNA revealed a rare gene mutation shared by four living families in Northern Ireland.

Hunter's canal, a tunnel for blood vessels named after John Hunter, lies in which part of the body?

The thigh is where Hunter tied a patient's main artery in 1785 to starve an aneurysm behind the knee. The man recovered in six weeks, and the method went on to save many lives.

John Hunter fell out with his brother William over who first traced the blood supply of which organ?

The placenta paper claimed for John a finding William had long taught as his own. The Royal Society printed neither side, and the brothers barely made peace before William died in 1783.

In 1767 John Hunter turned an accident into research after tearing which part of his own body?

His Achilles tendon snapped, by his own account after dancing. Studying how it mended led surgeons to cut tight tendons under the skin to free stiff and twisted joints.

In 1787 the Royal Society gave John Hunter which honour, its oldest award, for natural history?

The Copley Medal came twenty years after the Society made Hunter a fellow, a rank he had reached ahead of his older brother William, the established star of London anatomy.

John Hunter trained at St Bartholomew's under which surgeon, who linked soot to cancer in chimney sweeps?

Percivall Pott was one of the leading surgeons in London. Only when he died in 1788 was Hunter left as the undisputed head of the profession.

Which Philadelphia-born pupil of John Hunter has been called the 'Father of American Surgery'?

Philip Syng Physick was invited by Hunter to stay on and assist in his practice. He left for Edinburgh within months, and his later patients included Chief Justice John Marshall.

To show how bones grow, John Hunter fed young pigs which plant dye that tints freshly formed bone?

Madder tinged only the bone laid down while the pigs were eating it. The stained layers showed Hunter that bones enlarge by adding to their ends and outer surface, not by swelling from within.

The best-known portrait of John Hunter shows which part of Charles Byrne's skeleton in the top corner?

The feet dangle in the upper right of the canvas, above the seated surgeon. When the museum retired the skeleton from display in 2023, it chose to hang this painting in its place.

John Hunter withheld a geology paper after a friend objected to what it implied about which feature of the Earth?

Its great age was the trouble: Hunter's fossils pointed to changes lasting many thousand centuries, when the accepted figure was about six thousand years. The paper went unpublished until 1859.

As a young anatomist, John Hunter traced how which organs descend through the body before birth?

The testes form high in the abdomen, and Hunter described the cord, the gubernaculum, that guides each one down. He worked it out during his years in his brother's dissecting room.

John Hunter grafted a rooster's spur onto which other part of the bird, where it grew twice as fast?

Its comb is rich in blood, which Hunter took to be why the spur outgrew the one left on the leg. He also swapped spurs between a cock and a hen, and found they barely grew on the hen.

As an army surgeon in 1762, John Hunter studied gunshot wounds while serving in which European country?

Portugal gave him wounded soldiers to treat and spare hours for science, including studies of hibernating animals. He came home on half-pay in 1763 and set up in practice in London.