Nature dissected, or dissection naturalized? The case of John Hunter's museum

Abstract

At his death in 1793 the museum of the surgeon and anatomist John Hunter contained over thirteen thousand specimens and objects. Although many were the familiar stuff of natural history, the core of the collection consisted of over seven thousand human or animal body parts or ‘anatomical preparations’. They were testament to and the product of Hunter’s assiduous work as a dissector of dead bodies; a practice which, though becoming more widespread among medical practitioners, nevertheless possessed discomforting associations of personal and public impropriety. This paper explores the way in which the display of anatomical preparations served to legitimize dissection as a mode of natural historical inquiry, and by extension defused some of the social and moral anxieties surrounding the activities of private anatomy teachers in Georgian London.