The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 274 No 7342 p371
26 March 2005

An enjoyable read for any pharmacist with a grain of historical curiosity

‘The knife man: the extraordinary life and times of John Hunter, the father of modern surgery’, by Wendy Moore. Pp xiii+482. Price £18.99. London: Transworld Publishers; 2005. ISBN 0 593 05209 9

Most of us know almost as little about John Hunter, the father of modern surgery, as we do about Hippocrates, the father of medicine. With the publication of this new biography of Hunter, we can remedy this gap in our knowledge without it becoming a chore, since this is that rare combination: erudition and entertainment. We are fully informed not only in those areas we would expect to be, such as the brilliance of Hunter’s surgical technique, but also about less commendable and, until now, little known sides of his character and activities, like his nightly forays into London’s underworld to secure dead bodies for dissection. Hunter was not only the supreme surgeon of his day, but one of the greatest naturalists. He dissected any animal he could get hold of, even borrowing from a friend to buy a dead tiger. He waited on the quayside for a kangaroo from Captain Cook’s Endeavour, only to find the crew had eaten the kangaroo on the way home. He waited another 17 years to get one.

One tiny omission is that the author does not mention the remarkable parallels of Hunter’s background with that of Alexander Fleming. Each came from a poor farming family in the Robbie Burns country of south-west Scotland and went to London to live with an older doctor brother. Both gained international fame in their lifetime. Hunter diagnosed the liver cancer of David Hume, the philosopher, and examined the infant Byron’s club foot. Any pharmacist with a grain of historical curiosity will thoroughly enjoy this book.


Ray Sturgess

Ray Sturgess is a contributor to The Pharmaceutical Journal, mostly on the history of medicine and surgery