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meet this maverick and obsessive scientist, who left school at 13 with no qualifications but, thanks to his passion for observing, drawing and dissecting the animal and plant world he found around him, revolutionised our understanding of anatomy (as well as making serious contributions to botany). As one caption says: ‘By the time of his death in 1793, John Hunter was the most famous anatomist and surgeon in Britain.’
Te early rooms are about putting all this in context, however, and sharing with us some of the oldest surviving efforts by artists and would-be medics to draw, observe and preserve the human body. Te intention here, says Kent, is to emphasise the close relationship between art and science before these two sympathetic bedfellows were siloed off. Artists were just as likely to be present at dissections as future doctors, Kent says – Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Christopher Wren among them. If the latter two hadn’t absorbed the marvels of human infrastructure that were revealed to them on the dissection table, perhaps they could not have conceived of their vast cathedrals, whose roof trusses soar like ribcages above our heads.
Tat cross-fertilisation was written into the laws of the Royal College of Surgeons, says Kent, which was ‘established to promote the art and science of surgery’. Various showcases and large, dissecting-table style A/Vs bring those early experiments, and the tools by which they were conducted, into the room. But few exhibits are as fascinating (while also deeply disturbing) as the Evelyn Tables. Made some time in the 1640s, these are the oldest surviving anatomical preparations of their kind. Actual pathways of blood vessels and nerves have been painstakingly removed from deceased patients and, along with their surrounding tissues, dried onto four long, wooden boards. Tey are named after a 17th century amateur science enthusiast, John Evelyn, who discovered them in Padua – then a leading European centre for medical
Artists were just as likely to be present at dissections as future doctors...Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo [and] Christopher Wren among them
instruction – and brought them back to the UK. Teir reddish amber glow haunts one side of the gallery.
It’s in the third room that we meet Hunter – in fact we see him framed in a doorway, his marble bust glowing among the skulls of the animals he collected and dissected, while a soundtrack plays us the clucks, grunts, tweets and moos that would have emanated from them in their heyday. And, after learning about his obsessions and self-schooled experiments here, we find ourselves in the Long Hall. It would have been hard for anyone to compete with the original Crystal Gallery that my daughter and I witnessed, itself only built in 2005, and which had boosted visitor numbers up to 100,000 a year prior to the building’s closure for reconstruction. It was the scale of that reconstruction – keeping only the Grade II-listed frontage of the building while extending its footprint to the rear – that meant a new exhibition space was inevitable. When Casson Mann came on board in 2018, the 500 sq m museum space had already been allocated in the plan. Roger Mann says: ‘It was a very awkward space…the kind of space that’s left over when everything else has been decided.’ But they made the most of its horseshoe shape by devoting the longest volume, in the middle, to a new hall of specimens.
In terms of impact, I would say Casson Mann has matched the former display, albeit with a totally different atmosphere achieved by painting the hall in sombre, dark grey, which
makes the spotlit specimens all the more theatrical. Where the white setting of the previous display rather highlighted the yellowing tissues, Mann’s team chose this grey to cast a pinker, fresher glow over the specimens. Tey also spent ‘years and years’, says Mann, working with the curatorial team to ensure that each specimen has its own, short label, clearly flagged up so you can see exactly what you’re looking at (unlike before). To offer light relief from these fleshy relics, and refresh our understanding of Hunter’s life and times, there are small corridors off this hall that take us into rooms styled to evoke the homes and research environments Hunter enjoyed during his long and prosperous practice, from the live animals he surrounded himself with at his ‘country estate’ in Earls Court, to the dissecting table he used in his elegant drawing rooms in Leicester Square. All the rooms relating to Hunter are painted in tones that replicate the Georgian palette of the times. Tere’s also a rather fetching purple hue to the room that follows the Long Hall, which details some of Hunter’s famous patients as well as the surgeons he trained (he taught some 1,000 pupils over his lifetime, many of whom became leaders in their respective fields). In the following gallery, a deep Victorian blue, contrasting with soft grey, gives us the advances in surgery and medical care during the 19th century, then we move into clinical whites and greys in the penultimate gallery that brings us bang up-to-date on robotic surgery. Te final, darkened room pays tribute to the more patient-centric practices of this day and age (or at least, those we aspire to), with a 50-minute film exploring the experiences of several patients before, during and after surgery.
Set within this interpretative framework, the topics of surgery and medicine really come to life, as well as Hunter’s own astonishing trajectory. As Mann says: ‘For a farm boy from Glasgow, he did pretty well.’
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