Europe,” which Hunter had himself attended, the professor was obliged to demonstrate all the parts of the body, except the nerves and vessels (shown in a foetus) and the bones, on a single dead subject, and for the explanation of the operations of surgery used a dog! In 1747 Hunter became a member of the Corporation of Surgeons. In the course of a tour through Holland to Paris with his pupil, J. Douglas, in 1728, he visited Albinus at Leiden, and inspected with admiration his injected preparations. By degrees Hunter renounced surgical for obstetric practice, in which he excelled. He was appointed a surgeon-accoucheur at the Middlesex Hospital in 1748, and at the British Lying-in Hospital in the year following. The degree of M.D. was conferred upon him by the university of Glasgow on the 24th of October 1750. About the same time he left his old abode at Mrs Douglas’s, and settled as a physician in Jermyn Street. He became a licentiate of the College of Physicians on the 30th of September 1756. In 1762 he was consulted by Queen Charlotte, and in 1764 was made physician-extraordinary to her Majesty.
On the departure of his brother John for the army, Hunter engaged as an assistant William Hewson (1739–1774), whom he subsequently admitted to partnership in his lectures. Hewson was succeeded in 1770 by W. C. Cruikshank (1745–1800). Hunter was elected F.R.S. in 1767; F.S.A. in 1768, and third professor of anatomy to the Royal Academy of Arts; and in 1780 and 1782 respectively an associate of the Royal Medical Society and of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris. During the closing ten years of his life his health failed greatly. His last lecture, at the conclusion of which he fainted, was given, contrary to the remonstrances of friends, only a few days before his death, which took place in London on the 30th of March 1783. He was buried in the rector’s vault at St James’s, Piccadilly.
Hunter had in 1765 requested of the prime minister, George Grenville, the grant of a plot of ground on which he might establish “a museum in London for the improvement of anatomy, surgery, and physics” (see “Papers” at end of his Two Introductory Lectures, 1784), and had offered to expend on its erection £7000, and to endow in perpetuity a professorship of anatomy in connexion with it. His application receiving no recognition, he after many months abandoned his scheme, and built himself a house, with lecture and dissecting-rooms, in Great Windmill Street, whither he removed in 1770. In one fine apartment in this house was accommodated his collection, comprising anatomical and pathological preparations, ancient coins and medals, minerals, shells and corals. His natural history specimens were in part a purchase, for £1200, of the executors of his friend, Dr John Fothergill (1712–1780). Hunter’s whole collection, together with his fine library of Greek and Latin classics, and an endowment of £8000, by his will became, after the lapse of twenty years, the property of the university of Glasgow.
Hunter was never married, and was a man of frugal habits. Like his brother John, he was an early riser, and a man of untiring industry. He is described as being in his lectures, which were of two hours’ duration, “both simple and profound, minute in demonstration, and yet the reverse of dry and tedious”; and his mode of introducing anecdotal illustrations of his topic was most happy. Lecturing was to him a pleasure, and, notwithstanding his many professional distractions, he regularly continued it, because, as he said, he “conceived that a man may do infinitely more good to the public by teaching his art than by practising it” (see “Memorial” appended to Introd. Lect. p. 120).
Hunter was the author of several contributions to the Medical Observations and Enquiries and the Philosophical Transactions. In his paper on the structure of cartilages and joints, published in the latter in 1743, he anticipated what M. F. X. Bichat sixty years afterwards wrote concerning the structure and arrangement of the synovial membranes. His Medical Commentaries (pt. i., 1762, supplemented 1764) contains, among other like matter, details of his disputes with the Monros as to who first had successfully performed the injection of the tubuli testis (in which, however, both he and they had been forestalled by A. von Haller in 1745), and as to who had discovered the true office of the lymphatics, and also a discussion on the question whether he or Percivall Pott ought to be considered the earliest to have elucidated the nature of hernia congenita, which, as a matter of fact, had been previously explained by Haller. In the Commentaries is exhibited Hunter’s one weakness—an inordinate love of controversy. His impatience of contradiction he averred to be a characteristic of anatomists, in whom he once jocularly condoned it, on the plea that “the passive submission of dead bodies” rendered the crossing of their will the less bearable. His great work, The Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus, exhibited in Figures, fol., was published in 1774. His posthumous works are Two Introductory Lectures (1784), and Anatomical Description of the Human Gravid Uterus (1794), which was re-edited by Dr E. Rigby in 1843.
See Gent. Mag. liii. pt. 1, p. 364 (1783); S. F. Simmons, An Account of the Life of W. Hunter (1783); Adams’s and Ottley’s Lives of J. Hunter; Sir B. C. Brodie, Hunterian Oration (1837); W. Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, ii. 205 (1878). (F. H. B.)
HUNTER, WILLIAM ALEXANDER (1844–1898), Scottish
jurist and politician, was born in Aberdeen on the 8th of May
1844, and educated at Aberdeen grammar school and university.
He entered the Middle Temple, and was called to the English bar
in 1867, but then was occupied mainly with teaching. In 1869
he was appointed professor of Roman law at University College,
London, and in 1878 professor of jurisprudence, resigning that
chair in 1882. His name became well known during this period
as the author of a standard work on Roman law, Roman Law
in the Order of a Code, together with a smaller introductory
volume for students, Introduction to Roman Law. After 1882
Hunter took up politics and was elected to parliament for
Aberdeen as a Liberal in 1885. In the House of Commons he
was a prominent supporter of Charles Bradlaugh, he was the
first to advocate old age pensions, and in 1890 carried a proposal
to free elementary education in Scotland. In 1895 his health
broke down; he retired from parliament in 1896 and died on
the 21st of July 1898.
HUNTER, SIR WILLIAM WILSON (1840–1900), British publicist, son of Andrew Galloway Hunter, a Glasgow manufacturer, was born at Glasgow on the 15th of July 1840. He was educated at Glasgow University (B.A. 1860), Paris and Bonn, acquiring a knowledge of Sanscrit, and passing first in the final examination for the Indian Civil Service in 1862. Posted in the remote district of Birbhum in the lower provinces of Bengal, he began collecting local traditions and records, which formed the materials for his novel and suggestive publication, entitled The Annals of Rural Bengal, a book which did much to stimulate public interest in the details of Indian administration. He also compiled A Comparative Dictionary of the Non-Aryan Languages of India, a glossary of dialects based mainly upon the collections of Brian Houghton Hodgson, which testifies to the industry of the writer but contains much immature philological speculation. In 1872 he brought out two attractive volumes on the province of Orissa and its far-famed temple of Jagannath. In 1869 Lord Mayo asked Hunter to submit a scheme for a comprehensive statistical survey of the Indian empire. The work involved the compilation of a number of local gazetteers, in various stages of progress, and their consolidation in a condensed form upon a single and uniform plan. The conception was worthy of the gigantic projects formed by Arthur Young and Sir John Sinclair at the close of the 18th century, and the fact that it was successfully carried through between 1869 and 1881 was owing mainly to the energy and determination of Hunter. The early period of his undertaking was devoted to a series of tours which took him into every corner of India. He himself undertook the supervision of the statistical accounts of Bengal (20 vols., 1875–1877) and of Assam (2 vols., 1879). The various statistical accounts, when completed, comprised no fewer than 128 volumes. The immense task of condensing this mass of material proceeded concurrently with their compilation, an administrative feat which enabled The Imperial Gazetteer of India to appear in 9 volumes in 1881 (2nd ed., 14 vols., 1885–1887; 3rd ed., 26 vols., including atlas, 1908). Hunter adopted a transliteration of vernacular place-names, by which means the correct pronunciation is ordinarily indicated; but hardly sufficient allowance was made for old spellings consecrated by history and long usage. Hunter’s own article on India was published in 1880 as A Brief History of the Indian Peoples, and
