From anatomy to surgery to pathology: eighteenth century London and the Hunterian schools

Abstract

John Hunter, extolled for his pioneering contributions to surgery, was a surgeon as much by default as by design. By default, in that in spite of the urgings of his brother, William Hunter, M.D., John Hunter showed no interest in pursuit of a Doctorate in Medicine; and by default, in that he did not pursue training as a pathologist. There was good reason for the latter for in John Hunter’s day, Pathology did not exist as a discipline [1] and pathologists had not then been invented [2]. John Hunter had yet to take those first steps in a career that was later to contribute materially to the beginnings of the discipline of Pathology. Nonetheless, if some latter day title must be chosen to represent John Hunter’s abiding passion for investigation of disease by dissection, then the title ‘morbid anatomist’ fits as well as any (Fig. 1).