Hunter, John

Related Category: Medicine: Biographies

1728–93, Scottish anatomist and surgeon, studied under his brother, William Hunter. A pioneer in comparative anatomy and morphology who is sometimes called the father of modern surgery, he made many valuable investigations and introduced several surgical techniques, including a method of ligating aneurisms that is still in use. His writings include Natural History of the Human Teeth (1771), a work on sexually transmitted diseases (1786), and Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gunshot Wounds (1794). Hunter's anatomical collection, acquired in 1800 by the Royal College of Surgeons, London, formed the nucleus of the Hunterian Museum.

See biographies by E. A. Gray (1952), J. Kobler (1960), I. Noble (1971), and W. Moore (2005).