Oddlet: John Hunter · 1 min read
Apr 8, 2026
The Man Who Died in a Meeting
He grafted a human tooth onto a rooster's head to see what would happen. It grew.
John Hunter dropped out of school at thirteen, never earned a degree, and spent his youth dissecting animals in the Scottish countryside. He went on to become surgeon to King George III, pioneer the operation that overturned two thousand years of vascular surgery, and train Edward Jenner — the man who would eradicate smallpox. When Hunter entered the profession, surgery was a trade. By the time he was done with it, surgery was a science.
He also kept leopards in his London garden.
His Earl's Court estate doubled as an experimental compound stocked with leopards, jackals, buffalos, sheep, goats, and bees. Neighbors believed he kept lions. He didn't; that was just the buffalo stable. He once grafted a human tooth onto a rooster's head to see what would happen. It grew. His Leicester Square house received polite society through the front door on the square while resurrection men delivered cadavers through the back door on Castle Street; an arrangement said to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's home of Dr. Jekyll. His personal museum, at his death, held nearly fourteen thousand specimens from more than five hundred species. His motto, offered to Jenner in a letter, was: "But why think? Why not try the experiment?"
On October 16, 1793, Hunter attended a meeting at St. George's Hospital about the admission of students. He got into an argument with his fellow surgeons. His heart, long weakened by angina, stopped.
The founder of scientific surgery was killed by a committee meeting.
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- **Wikipedia – John Hunter (surgeon)** — Comprehensive overview with citations; good starting point, cross-checked against primary sources below.
- **Britannica – John Hunter** — Reliable encyclopaedia entry; appropriately cautious on the self-inoculation question ("sometimes said to have been himself").
- **The James Lind Library – John Hunter (1728–93)** — Scholarly article focused on Hunter's experimental methods; peer-reviewed context; notes the inoculation subject was "almost certainly himself."
- **PMC / Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons – "The Knife Man" review** — Peer-reviewed book review by a surgeon; explicitly debates the self-inoculation claim and presents the counter-argument (Qvist, 1981).
- **PMC – "John Hunter's Alleged Syphilis"** — Peer-reviewed article arguing the inoculation was NOT self-performed; important counterweight — uncertainty flagged throughout this draft.
- **Hunterian Museum – John Hunter**
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