John Hunter’s house on Leicester Square had two faces: aristocrats came through the front door to consult him, while body snatchers delivered corpses through the back, a setup said to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Born in Scotland in 1728, the youngest of 10, Hunter dropped out of school and worked as a cabinet maker before joining his brother William’s London anatomy school in 1748, where his skill soon had him running the dissection classes. As an army surgeon on Belle Île in 1761 during the Seven Years’ War, he concluded that inflammation was the body’s own defense, not something to bleed away.

Back in London he transplanted freshly pulled teeth from poor donors into wealthy patients and amassed nearly 14,000 preparations and a menagerie of leopards, ostriches and jackals. He bribed an undertaker, reportedly 500 pounds, to swap the body of Charles Byrne, the 7 foot 7 Irish giant who wanted burial at sea, for paving stones, then boiled it in a copper vat for his collection. His 1786 venereal disease experiment, likely on an unwitting subject, wrongly merged gonorrhea and syphilis, a mistake Philippe Ricord corrected in the 1830s.

• Modern historians’ rejection of murder rumors and the role of untreatable preeclampsia
• Surgeon extraordinary to George III in 1776 and surgeon general of the army in 1790
• His merit exams for army surgeons and his feud with brother William
• Dye and wax injections that traced the lymphatic system and separate maternal and fetal blood
• His death after a heated board meeting at St. George’s Hospital in 1793 and the Hunterian Museum