William Hunter

British physician

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History

William Hunter (born May 23, 1718, Long Calderwood, Lanarkshire, Scot.—died March 30, 1783, London, Eng.) was a British obstetrician, educator, and medical writer who did much, by his high standards of teaching and medical practice, to remove obstetrics from the hands of the midwives and establish it as an accepted branch of medicine.

Hunter received his medical degree from the University of Glasgow in 1750 and became a licensed physician in London in 1756. He did his first teaching in 1746 and continued to lecture, usually on topics of surgery or anatomy, throughout his life. While in France (1743–44 and 1748) he observed that individual medical students in that country were provided with cadavers for dissection; he, in turn, introduced the practice to Great Britain. When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, Hunter was appointed professor of anatomy. He left his extensive collection of books, coins, and works of art to the University of Glasgow, an act that inspired the opening of the Hunterian Museum, Scotland’s first public museum, in 1807.

After 1756 Hunter’s medical practice was devoted principally to obstetrics, and he was the most successful specialist in this field in Great Britain in his day, becoming physician extraordinary to Queen Charlotte in 1762. He wrote three books, the most important being The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, Exhibited in Figures (1774).