The story of how an 18th-century surgeon created modern medicine is full of graves, guts and gore, writes Illtyd Harrington

The Knife Man by Wendy Moore
Bantam Press, £18.99

IT was early in September 1748 that 20-year-old John Hunter ended his 12-day ride from Scotland to Covent Garden. He got off his horse to join his surgeon brother William. John, one of 10 children, had virtually no formal education after the age of 13, a condition that proved no obstacle to his sensational rise as the father of modern surgery.
He was reputedly the model for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as well as the more benign Dr Doolittle.
Brother William put him to work immediately, for his school of anatomy in Covent Garden needed its basic material – dead bodies.
This was the era of the bodysnatchers and graverobbers. In London, surgeons were only allowed six bodies a year to dissect, and there was fierce competition for the half a dozen corpses after they were cut down from the gallows at Tyburn on one of the eight hanging days.
John, with the zeal of a butcher but with the developing mind of a pragmatic scientist, ploughed ahead. In those days the barber’s pole was the symbol of his other job: surgeon. Surgery was brutal and practised in conditions of filth and ignorance. Bloodletting was the fashion. Alcohol, opium or Peruvian bark – quinine – was the only palliative.
John’s obsessive curiosity with human and animal anatomy was never less than intense for the next 50 years of his life. He went into uncharted territory. He tried transplanting a tooth in cockerel’s head, as well as a human testicle in a cockerel’s stomach to watch developments.
He probably performed the first successful artificial insemination, first on a moth, then on a childless couple. The moth had sextuplets; the couple had a son.
It was almost certain that he deliberately infected himself with venereal disease convinced that gonorrhea and syphilis were the same disease. His intellectual compulsions demanded he found out.
The rich flocked to his consulting rooms in Jermyn Street and later in Leicester Square, but the poor and needy were never forgotten. Inevitably his growing fame and success brought professional jealousy and lasting enmity.
A spell in the army took him to Portugal during the 1760s and excited his interest in geology. Then he began to doubt the traditional views on the creation of the world and its age. He saw that Adam and Eve were based on a rusty premise, as were the Creation and the Great Flood.
To him, Adam and Eve were black, therefore so was God. This was 100 years before Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. A dangerous heresy, not a welcome qualification for George III’s surgeon.
He bought himself a villa in rural Earl’s Court which he filled with exotic animals form across the world. All the time he did his utmost to advance medical and scientific knowledge. Assiduous in his duties at St George’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner, he withstood daily professional spite and obstruction .
Hunter himself read little and had none of the culture or social graces of his surgeon brother William. Yet he shone in the debates on the recently formed Royal Society, and won the respect of Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Lord Byron and Benjamin Franklin, one of the society’s founding fathers.
His wife Anne Home, who he married in St James’s, Piccadilly, in 1776, became a figure in London society, organising grand soirees while he might be busy working on a human corpse or animal carcass in another room.
Slowly the age of the Enlightenment saw intellectual discipline strengthening with the growth of professional centres of learning. This included the Royal Veterinary College, which he helped to found.
More than 3,000 corpses were to pass under his knife and some of the brightest, future leaders of medicine were his zealous and loyal students.
Among the thousands, his favourite was Edward Jenna, who pioneered the smallpox vaccine.
Hunter, like others, had little knowledge of germs. A victim of angina, he died while walking the wards of St George’s on October 16, 1793, and was buried in St-Martin’s-in-the-Fields on October 22. His colleagues at St George’s refused to express their condolences.
In January 1859 he was given a place in Westminster Abbey and a plaque provided by the Royal College of Surgeons simply saying: “John Hunter, founder of Scientific Surgery”. What a powerful epitaph.
The remainder of his fossils and specimens, 14,000 originally, are housed in the Hunterian Museum, headquarters of the Royal College of Surgeons, 34-43 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, WC2. (Telephone 020 7405 3474.)
Wendy Moore has written not just a wonderful biography, but something that gets to the root of that lasting quest for answers, which excited genius and defies orthodoxy.