Wendy Moore - Author and freelance writer




Knife Man: Blood, Body-snatching and the Birth of Modern Surgery
by Wendy Moore

From humble Scottish origins, John Hunter rose to become the most famous anatomist and surgeon of the eighteenth century. In an age when operations were crude, extremely painful and often fatal, Hunter rejected medieval traditions based on ancient Greek orthodoxy to forge a revolution in surgery founded on pioneering scientific experiments. Using the knowledge gained from countless human dissections, Hunter worked to improve medical care for both the poorest and the best-known characters of the time, including the prime minister William Pitt, the artist Sir Joshua Reynolds and the young Lord Byron.

Relentlessly studying all life forms, Hunter was an expert naturalist too. He kept exotic creatures in his country menagerie at Earls Court and dissected the first animals brought back by Captain Cook from Australia. It was Hunter who dissected the first kangaroo and the first giraffe brought to British shores. Ultimately his research led him to expound highly controversial views on the age of the earth, as well as equally heretical beliefs on the origins of life more than sixty years before Darwin published his famous theory.

Although a central figure of the Enlightenment, revered by fellow scientists and friendly with high society, Hunter’s tireless quest for human corpses immersed him deep in the sinister world of body-snatching. He paid exorbitant sums for stolen cadavers, stalked interesting specimens and even managed to steal the body of Charles Byrne, better known as the ‘Irish giant’.

Byrne’s skeleton, along with thousands more trophies of Hunter’s research, can still be seen today in the Hunterian Museum at the headquarters of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in London.

More than the body parts he bequeathed to the nation or the numerous surgical improvements he pioneered, Hunter’s lasting contribution is the unparalleled impact of his doctrine on our medicine today. John Hunter unleashed a medical revolution by his insistence that all surgery, indeed all forms of treatment, should be based on sound scientific evidence. It was this doctrine that he applied to all his own work and it was the same creed that he taught to the students who flocked to his lectures. It was the application of science to medicine and he is rightly celebrated today as the founder of scientific surgery.


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