The Hunter Brothers The Beauty of Anatomy


The Hunter Brothers

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We are our bodies.

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We see the outside all the time

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but that's less than half the story - the surface, the exterior.

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We know far less about what's inside.

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Heaven forbid that we should actually see our insides.

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Most people go through their life

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without getting a look at their organs

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and for good reason.

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My lungs and kidneys and heart

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and bones and muscles, arteries and veins, they do their jobs unseen.

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But for anatomists, the doctors and artists who have struggled

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for centuries to understand how our bodies actually work,

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getting inside - dissection - was vital.

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In this five-part series,

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I've been investigating the beautiful synthesis between discoveries

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in anatomy and the works of art that illustrate them.

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As a scientist myself and someone who is fascinated by anatomical drawing

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I want to find out exactly how anatomy has inspired art, and art, anatomy.

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One of the most extraordinary anatomical artworks ever made

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was produced in London in the 18th century.

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The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus

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was an epic atlas that laid out in meticulous detail all of the stages of pregnancy.

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It united two brilliant but controversial Scottish brothers

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who transformed both medicine and art,

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but by the end of their lives, it had also driven them apart.

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The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus was

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the work of two of the leading

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anatomists of the 18th century, William and John Hunter,

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two brothers who lived and worked here in Covent Garden.

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It is a jewel from a period when art and anatomy were

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becoming ever more closely interwoven,

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and when anatomy was transforming the principals of surgery.

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So how did these two brothers construct such an exquisite masterpiece?

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And what does it tell us about art and anatomy from Georgian Britain?

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And where on earth did they get all those corpses from?

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In the winter of 1750, the anatomist midwife and lecturer William Hunter

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was about to oversee the most important dissection of his career.

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The body lying on William Hunter's dissecting table that winter's day

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was that of a woman in the final stages of pregnancy.

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Who she was, or where she came from remains shrouded in mystery.

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All we know is that she had died suddenly,

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but with the fully formed baby still inside her womb.

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The process that followed would be repeated many times on a series of pregnant women.

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The body was cut open by William's younger brother John Hunter,

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the most skilled dissector and innovative surgeon of the age.

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And each stage in the process was captured in vivid red chalk by a Dutch artist called Jan Van Rymsdyk.

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25 years after that first dissection, William pulled all

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of these findings together and published his great book.

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Now this is an original edition of William Hunter's

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The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, published in 1774.

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The first thing you notice about it is its size -

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it's absolutely massive.

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Absurdly large, in fact.

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But this was important to Hunter,

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he wanted as many of the illustrations as possible to

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be life-size - only that way, he believed,

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could the detail of all the parts be accurately represented,

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and for Hunter the goal was absolute accuracy.

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Well, when you see this for the first time, there's no doubt that it is slightly shocking.

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The baby in the middle is beautiful,

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like a sleeping child waiting to born,

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but as you pan out, you see that the mother has been anatomised,

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she's been dissected,

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and entirely dehumanised into a sort of butchered piece of meat.

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So there is this staggering contrast between the humanity of the baby, this perfect organism,

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and the fully dehumanised mother.

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I find this image very powerful and very moving,

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but it's also incredibly accurate.

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The previous depictions of the baby "in utero", in the womb,

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they often show a lot of space between the baby

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and the walls of the womb,

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whereas you can see here that it is crammed

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into this incredibly tiny space,

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it shows the intimacy between the baby and the mother.

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All of these illustrations are of an extremely high quality

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and the use of shadow and light creates attention to detail,

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creates an incredible three-dimensional effect.

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There are so many textures here, whether it is in the skin, or the umbilical cord

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or even in the locks of the baby's hair.

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It was an epic undertaking.

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In all, there are 34 plates with 70 illustrations examining

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the process of pregnancy.

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It reflects a time when a new breed of male midwives,

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or obstetricians as they are now known,

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were first starting to apply science to pregnancy.

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This wasn't the only book of its kind,

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but it was the most impressive.

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Simon, I really want to ask you what makes this stand out

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from the other texts of the time, but the first thing that

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stands out is its sheer size!

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It's almost comically large.

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Yeah, it's not a handy book.

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It's designed to be big, it's designed to be impressive.

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It's a piece of willy waving by William Hunter,

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the greatest anatomist and man midwife of his period,

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at least in his eyes, and this is his statement of intent -

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he's showing off with this book.

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As well as being this grand production, there is

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a bit of new science in the book, there is

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a thing that William Hunter is famous for having discovered

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and that's the circulation in the placenta.

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These are different views that allows you to see where vessels connect,

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or in this case, don't connect.

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What he is trying to show is that although

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they come into very close contact, the mother's blood and the baby's blood don't actually mingle together.

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-And Hunter was the first person to note that, was he?

-So he says.

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By dissecting pregnant women,

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showing the structure of the gravid uterus, the pregnant uterus

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and the placenta, William Hunter is really saying that these are objects of medical attention.

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Up until the middle of the 18th century, midwifery has been largely

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work done by female midwives and not seen as a medical event in that sense

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and certainly not as something worthy of this kind of detailed

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anatomical study.

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William was able to produce a work of this unprecedented level of detail

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because of the changes taking place in anatomy in 18th-century London.

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As well as revealing the internal structure of the body,

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anatomy was now being used to inform and improve surgery.

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Private anatomy schools were being established,

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including one run by William, which for many years,

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was based here at Number One Great Piazza in Covent Garden.

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Here, his brother John tirelessly dissected bodies, while William

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delivered ground-breaking lectures that offered something new.

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In October 1746,

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William Hunter placed an advert for his first anatomy course in London.

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"Gentlemen shall have the opportunity to learn the art of dissection

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"for the whole winter season in the same manner as in Paris."

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Now that French style was the key.

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In Paris, students learned, not just by watching, but by doing.

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And that was what Hunter wanted to copy.

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He wanted his students to perform the dissections themselves and

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acquire the knowledge of anatomy based on their own experiences.

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But there was a problem.

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For students to do their own dissections,

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the school needed an unprecedented number of dead bodies.

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William's brother John later recalled that in 12 years

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at the school, he attended the dissection of over 2,000 corpses.

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But the methods used to obtain them were notoriously unsavoury.

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John came down to London when he was 20 years old

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and joined William in the Covent Garden school.

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So essentially he came down as an assistant to William,

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but he was also there to learn the trade of anatomy, to learn the craft.

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There was no legal supply of bodies for private anatomy schools like William's.

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John started to make connections with men who would willingly go and dig up

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bodies for a payment, and gradually that became a kind of profession.

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So, really, it was William and John who kick-started that whole industry in body snatching.

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These body snatchers were known at the time as Resurrection men.

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The Resurrection men worked throughout the winter anatomy season,

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greeting the palms of grave-diggers and night-watchmen

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and creeping into cemeteries in the dead of night to filch

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the bodies of the recently departed.

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They became so skilled at their nefarious trade,

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that a freshly dead body could be exhumed from a shallow grave in just a quarter of an hour.

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A really good team could spirit away up to ten bodies in a single night.

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The authorities largely turned a blind eye to the shadowy trade

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as well-trained surgeons were in high demand.

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But an outraged public knew exactly who was driving it.

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Here is a cartoon from 1773 entitled,

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The Anatomist Overtaken By The Watch.

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The night-watchman has disturbed a grave robbery in progress.

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So the anatomist is detected as fleeing the scene.

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He has dropped some papers behind him on which the words,

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"Hunter's lectures" are clearly visible.

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It's likely that the bodies of the pregnant women

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dissected for The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus were

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obtained through these shady networks.

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And once in his possession, William had to act swiftly to

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record his findings with as much accuracy and detail as possible.

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Fortunately, the man he turned to was ideally suited to the task.

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These are the original chalk drawings by Jan van Rymsdyk

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made for William Hunter's The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus.

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They are extremely beautiful.

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This one has a sort of ironic beauty to it.

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The baby looks so peaceful and lifelike.

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The irony being, of course, that this is a dissection.

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Van Rymsdyk created over 60 illustrations

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for William's atlas over a 22-year period.

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In each one, he skilfully manipulated his red chalk to

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produce a range of surface textures, but what really

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leaps off the page is his astonishing dedication to accuracy.

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Here's a terrific example of that detail.

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On the membrane covering the foetus's head,

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Van Rymsdyk has drawn the reflection of the 12-paned window,

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possibly the skylight from William Hunter's dissection room.

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Now of course it has no anatomical relevance whatsoever,

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but it is part of Hunter's insistence on giving

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the impression of realism, that you are actually in the room with him.

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It's an example of what he referred to as the mark of truth.

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This realism set these drawings apart from anatomical

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illustrations of the past.

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Anatomists like Vesalius, back in the 16th century,

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had amalgamated all the available knowledge to create idealised

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images that were true because they were perfect.

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William Hunter was in pursuit of a different kind of truth.

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He believed his artists should show the specimen

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in front of them with all of their flaws and imperfections,

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and that was something that Van Rymsdyk did brilliantly.

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Peter, tell us about the artist.

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-What do we know about Van Rymsdyk?

-Not a great deal.

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I don't think we know a date of birth,

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I don't think we know with whom he studied.

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He tried to make a name as an artist.

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He went off to Bath at one point which was a place where

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society went and there were opportunities for portrait painters.

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He put advertisements in the local paper saying that he would

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produce portraits.

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Those that survive show that he was much better as an anatomical

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draughtsman than as a painter.

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He has this amazing self-effacing style

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and my interpretation is that this requirement from the anatomist,

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Hunter, to present the material in this very plain, scientifically-accurate way,

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affected his mental balance somewhat.

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One of the things that we know about him

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is that he developed a real resentment towards William Hunter.

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My interpretation is that Rymsdyk was an unlucky and unhappy person.

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He seems to have blamed Hunter for the fact that he was

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best known as an anatomical draughtsman and not as a painter.

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But the biggest blow was struck when The Gravid Uterus was published.

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In the preface, William thanked his brother John and the engraver

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Robert Strange, but Rymsdyk's name was not mentioned.

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Rymsdyk never forgave Hunter.

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But this realistic and scientific way of seeing a body was

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having a big impact on both anatomy and art.

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Anatomical teaching was increasingly focused on surgical detail.

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William's collections at Glasgow University show just how

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good he and his brother were at harnessing

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the power of the visual to communicate anatomical truth.

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As well as giving his students a cadaver,

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or a whole body to work on, William Hunter also handed out

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preserved specimens to illustrate aspects of anatomy that were

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not commonly seen, and what is clever

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about that is that they provided a snapshot, a moment of a dissection

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or a specific body part that could be used over and over again.

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These preparations of tissues, organs and bones,

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were designed to be eye-catching and memorable.

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It is impossible to tell now which were made by William

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and which by John, but all of them display incredible levels of skill.

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I think they were exceptional.

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If you did one of these today, it would be really high rated.

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But I think they are even more exceptional when you look at any

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of these and put it in context of this is mid-1700s.

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So there was no embalming.

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They had to work quickly, typically in winter, typically by candlelight.

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Now this one is particularly interesting.

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I don't really know what it is but it is...breathtakingly detailed.

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-What is that?

-It is a bit of intestine.

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It is one of my favourite things in the museum.

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When you try and rationalise how they were able to do this,

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it's mind-boggling.

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What we do understand is that they probably did

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a mixture of things like painting something,

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like lacquer on the outside to make it tight and a bit tougher.

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And then immersing it in turpentine to make it a little bit more transparent.

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And the level of skill to do that perfectly over this entire coil is astonishing.

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And several of these are kind of glinting with what looks like metal.

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Well, this shiny silver that you are seeing in a lot of these

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specimens is mercury that has been injected very, very gently,

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and this was very trendy at the time.

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It was a fantastic way of looking at very small blood vessels and very

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small lymphatic vessels and tracing their pathway all the way through.

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And the Hunter brothers were exceptional at it.

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But when we try and replicate these things, it is

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just a level of commitment that is difficult to reproduce.

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These preparations are ideal for teaching the minute aspects of anatomy.

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But when it came to communicating his findings on pregnancy,

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William and employed a more unusual technique.

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With the help of artists,

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he made remarkable plaster casts of the dissected women and had them

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painted in lifelike colours so that they carried the mark of truth.

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They were really one of his most ultimate teaching tools and they

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are graphic, they are challenging, but extremely educational.

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I can see that these could be useful as teaching tools

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because in the sequence, this baby is actually breach,

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is actually head up when it should be pointing downwards.

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I think that the understanding of that, the position of the child, was a big step forward.

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And making that popular and well-known, not just medically

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but into the broader community, was a really big advantage.

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There was a lot of skill and a lot of talent going in to making these.

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So the team that contributed to it did a wonderful job,

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and centuries later we are still a little bit shocked by them and a little bit in awe about them.

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Through the work of William Hunter, art and anatomy were becoming more closely linked than ever before.

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But it wasn't merely through artists aiding anatomical teaching.

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William was also instrumental in making anatomical truth central to British art.

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This is William Hunter's formidable art collection

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and it really reflects his twin passions which were art and anatomy.

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William's successful midwifery practice, which served

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the highest levels of society, had made him a rich man

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and he invested heavily in art which now resides in Glasgow's Hunterian Art Gallery.

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The collection includes portraits by masters such as Rubens

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and this wonderful painting of Christ's entombment by Rembrandt.

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It also contains work by Hunter's contemporaries,

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such as the British artist William Hogarth.

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This is a plate from Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty.

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It is a sort of summary of his attitudes towards art at the time.

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And what is really interesting about it, for me,

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is the amount of anatomy on display here.

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So this is a sculptor's yard in Hyde Park Corner where

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they were churning out reproductions of classical sculptures,

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including the Belvedere Torso, which at the time was considered

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one of the greatest expressions of anatomy in sculpture.

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Now, like many British artists at the time, Hogarth believed that

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if he and his contemporaries were to match the scale of the ancients,

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then they had to have a really precise knowledge of anatomy.

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So strong was this belief that it became one of the guiding

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principles in London's newest arts institution.

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In 1768, the Royal Academy of Arts was founded by the leading artists and architects of the day.

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Under the leadership of the renowned painter Joshua Reynolds, it aimed

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to promote the arts of design and steer British art into the future.

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This is an engraving of a painting by Johan Zoffany

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and it shows the founder members of the Royal Academy,

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well, it shows the male founder members at least.

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The two female founders are only here as portraits

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because they were not allowed in the artist's studio,

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mostly due to the presence of this guy, a nude male model.

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Now this guy with the ear trumpet, that is the president,

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Joshua Reynolds.

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And right next to him, at the very centre of this picture,

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is the only founder member who wasn't an artist.

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It is William Hunter.

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He was the Royal Academy's first professor of anatomy.

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There is no greater sign of the importance being awarded to

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anatomy in British art at this time.

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In his role, William was required to deliver lectures on the skeleton

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and the muscles, and once again he used innovative teaching tools.

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Evidence of his methods survive at the magnificent Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow.

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In the early 1750s,

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the Hunter brothers acquired a corpse from the gallows.

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They skinned it and made a full-size cast of the body

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which William used in his art classes.

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This exquisite model is a wax replica of that full-size body.

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Later on, William had bronze copies made of this model

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so that artists could buy their own handy versions.

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They soon became regarded as an essential part of every

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artist's toolkit.

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There weren't many British painters before the advent

0:22:230:22:27

of the Royal Academy who did any more than paint portraits.

0:22:270:22:31

A sea change is the development of historical pictures with

0:22:310:22:35

full-length figures.

0:22:350:22:37

You see it in the history paintings of, to name a prime example,

0:22:370:22:41

the young American painter Benjamin West who came as a very young

0:22:410:22:45

man to England, was a student at the Royal Academy, and he produced a

0:22:450:22:49

series of sometimes nude figures,

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and he demonstrates in those figures a knowledge of anatomy

0:22:520:22:55

that you would find in classic Old Master paintings,

0:22:550:22:57

if you looked back to Rubens and other painters in the previous century.

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West was showing that he could do the same.

0:23:000:23:03

Anatomy, which had always brought men of science

0:23:040:23:07

and men of art together,

0:23:070:23:09

was being seized upon by artists in Britain with a fresh zeal,

0:23:090:23:14

but at the same time, it was also helping to revolutionise

0:23:140:23:17

science through the work of William's brother, John.

0:23:170:23:21

In 1760, after 12 years with William, John moved on to

0:23:220:23:26

pursue a career in surgery.

0:23:260:23:28

While William continued as a midwife and teacher,

0:23:280:23:31

John pioneered new treatments for aneurysms, gunshot wounds

0:23:310:23:35

and conducted a range of medical experiments.

0:23:350:23:38

Driving all of this was his radical new approach.

0:23:380:23:41

I think what John Hunter did that was significantly different was to

0:23:440:23:48

move anatomy from being the gross structure of the human body,

0:23:480:23:53

or the identification of small parts of the normal human body,

0:23:530:23:57

into understanding the body as a living thing,

0:23:570:24:01

both a healthy living thing but also the body in disease.

0:24:010:24:04

And what really cared about was helping to make people better,

0:24:040:24:08

so it wasn't just taking things apart,

0:24:080:24:10

it was understanding what made things live, how to cure them.

0:24:100:24:13

I think John Hunter was always alive to the idea that you can learn from

0:24:150:24:19

the extremes, so he was interested in all kinds of deformities.

0:24:190:24:23

Amongst the specimens in the John Hunter collection

0:24:230:24:25

are the skeleton of Charles Byrne, known as the Irish giant.

0:24:250:24:29

He was about 7'7" seven tall, so pretty tall by today's standards,

0:24:290:24:33

let alone by the standards of the 18th century.

0:24:330:24:35

And when he died, John Hunter was interested in dissecting his body.

0:24:350:24:40

And for him that was all part of this unravelling of the mysteries

0:24:400:24:43

of the human body, what happened to it when things went wrong.

0:24:430:24:46

What John was seeking was the truth in all of life.

0:24:480:24:52

And this took him towards ideas which conflicted with

0:24:520:24:55

those of his brother and which at the time bordered on heresy.

0:24:550:24:58

John Hunter is a radical thinker.

0:25:020:25:06

He is somebody who believes that the world could function without

0:25:060:25:10

there necessarily being a Creator.

0:25:100:25:13

He argued, in private on the basis of fossils, that the Earth was

0:25:130:25:18

many hundreds of thousands of years old, many millions of years old.

0:25:180:25:22

And once you open up that amount of time,

0:25:240:25:26

you open up the possibility for evolution.

0:25:260:25:29

John's views on the origins of life were very

0:25:330:25:36

different from those of his brother.

0:25:360:25:37

For William, the pursuit of anatomical truth was

0:25:370:25:41

affirmation of the existence of God.

0:25:410:25:44

And just like many contemporaries,

0:25:440:25:46

he believed that the wonders revealed in The Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus

0:25:460:25:50

were testament to the perfection of the Creator

0:25:500:25:53

and his unrivalled capacity for design.

0:25:530:25:56

The Hunter brothers had always differed.

0:26:000:26:03

But in the years following the publication of The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus,

0:26:030:26:07

their relationship fell apart.

0:26:070:26:09

Initially, John and William had a very good relationship,

0:26:110:26:14

there was a great deal of loyalty there.

0:26:140:26:16

But as soon as John really started to outshine his teacher

0:26:160:26:20

and assert his own independence, that's when the trouble started.

0:26:200:26:25

And it is quite likely that their first arguments

0:26:250:26:27

happened because of William's insistence that any dissection

0:26:270:26:32

work that was done, essentially belonged to him.

0:26:320:26:35

At least half of the images in The Gravid Uterus were

0:26:360:26:40

almost certainly drawn from bodies that were dissected by John Hunter.

0:26:400:26:46

16 out of the 34 plates were produced in the Covent Garden school,

0:26:460:26:51

and William did virtually no dissection at that period.

0:26:510:26:54

So certainly nearly half of the work was John's actual handiwork.

0:26:540:26:58

In 1780, John and William publicly fell out over who was truly

0:27:010:27:06

responsible for the revelations published within The Gravid Uterus

0:27:060:27:09

and they never really repaired their relationship,

0:27:090:27:12

despite the fact that John treated William on his deathbed.

0:27:120:27:15

Now in 1783, William died,

0:27:150:27:18

but John had been completely cut out of his will.

0:27:180:27:22

William left his entire collection of specimens, the arts,

0:27:220:27:26

the whole lot, here, to Glasgow University.

0:27:260:27:29

Today, two separate Hunterian Museums

0:27:330:27:35

testify to this split between the brothers.

0:27:350:27:38

William's collections in Glasgow reveal a respected teacher,

0:27:410:27:44

an acknowledged gentleman of wealth and consequence,

0:27:440:27:47

and a man whose passion for anatomy was matched only by his passion for art.

0:27:470:27:52

In London, John's museum testifies to one man's obsession with

0:27:550:27:59

science and nature and his tireless quest to understand all of life.

0:27:590:28:04

But the Hunter brothers have also left behind a legacy that

0:28:080:28:11

reaches beyond the walls of their respective museums.

0:28:110:28:14

Despite their differences, the Hunter brothers, William and John,

0:28:160:28:20

both had an ardent zeal for the pursuit of truth.

0:28:200:28:23

They put anatomical accuracy at the heart of both medicine and art,

0:28:230:28:27

and they promoted a scientific approach to surgery that has inspired practitioners ever since.

0:28:270:28:33

And all of this is encapsulated in the luxuriant splendour,

0:28:330:28:38

the stark scientific accuracy and the exquisite art that is

0:28:380:28:42

William Hunter's The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus.

0:28:420:28:46

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