may have the opportunity of learning the Art of Dissecting during the
whole winter session in the same manner as at Paris.”^9
William Hunter’s anatomy school was the first of its kind in London
(amazingly, the first chartered medical school in London was founded in
1785, although there had been informal schooling at St. Bartholomew’s
Hospital for centuries). Hunter’s anatomy school opened in a rented
Covent Garden apartment in 1746 (in 1749, moving nearby to 1 Great
Piazza, Covent Garden, now an Apple store!) and was an immediate
success. The triumph of the school and Hunter’s growing practice
mandated assistance in the procurement and preparation of corpses, and in
what seems like desperation, William asked his brother John Hunter, ten
years his junior, to move to London and assist him at the school.
William Hunter, “attired in brocade and lace, and sporting a full
powdered wig, dined with fellow Scottish intellectuals [and bridged
settings such as] coffeehouses and theaters, dissecting rooms and salons
... and the contrasting worlds of science and the arts.”^10 Younger brother
John could have hardly been more different, having dropped out of school
as a thirteen-year-old (perhaps suffering from dyslexia), gaining notoriety
as an “awkward, uncultured, and largely uneducated country lad ... with a
shock of red hair.”^11 Ten years separated the two brothers, but there had
been an abundance of tragedies since they had last seen each other when
John was just twelve years of age. John Hunter was the last of ten children,
born to a sixty-five-year-old father. Of John’s nine siblings, six had died
by the time he traveled to London, leaving William as his only stable
guide in a world fraught with instability and disease.
John Hunter had rejected the traditional English grammar school
upbringing, choosing instead to roam the countryside, investigating the
flora and fauna of South Lanarkshire. If his later life is any indication, it
seems that John Hunter was incapable of recoiling in response to
putrefaction, essentially immune to all things unsavory or repugnant.
Instead of a preparatory education at Eton and an Oxbridge bachelor’s
degree, John Hunter came to London with insatiable curiosity, congenital
skepticism, and a battle-born durability.
John Hunter arrived in London in 1748 as a twenty-year-old, and
despite his lack of formal education, was poised to serve as his brother’s
assistant at the anatomy school, now two years old and thriving. They
hardly knew each other, and a safe conjecture is that William was