John and William Hunter worked together for twelve years, the elder
brother gaining notoriety among the well-heeled and royalty, eventually
becoming obstetrician to Queen Charlotte (who gave birth to fifteen
children, including the future Kings George IV and William IV). John, on
the other hand, flourished first as a body man and later as an expert
anatomist. A fresh supply of corpses was John’s vocation, and his
“youthful liking for a drink, lack of social airs, and colorful language
evidently endeared him to his sinister suppliers.”^15
Even in their first winter together, a surprising transformation occurred:
John’s preternatural skills with the knife were laid bare, and by the spring
of 1749, “William declared his protégé sufficiently accomplished to take
over all the dissecting work at the school.”^16 Thief by night, the
resurrectionist was blossoming into an anatomist with authority, and after
a year at the school, contemplated the impossible—brandishing his knife
on the living. William had followed the typical route of an esteemed
physician in London, matriculating from prestigious institutions and
proving himself to the intellectual community. The path to becoming a
surgeon would be vastly different for John, as there existed no formalized
schooling, testing, nor accreditation for aspiring surgeons.
More than 150 years would pass before any semblance of a surgery
residency existed either in Europe or America; John Hunter scrambled in
1749 to form a relationship with the most esteemed surgeon in the London
area in hopes of transforming himself into a surgeon. William Cheselden
(1688–1752), head of the newly formed Company of Surgeons, had
himself become a surgeon through the study of anatomy and
apprenticeship under practicing surgeons in Leicester and London. (In
1800, a royal charter was granted to the College of Surgeons, and for the
first time, a college degree and acceptance into the Royal College of
Physicians was required before training to become a surgeon.) For a few
short years, before Cheselden’s death, John Hunter was apprenticed to him
at his home office and at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. Instead of viewing
Hunter as an unqualified and unsophisticated country boy, Cheselden
identified Hunter as an anatomy enthusiast and heir to his surgical
governance.
Years later, William Hunter recalled, “Were I to place a man of proper
talents, in the most direct road for becoming truly great in his profession, I
would chuse [sic] a good practical Anatomist, and put him through into a