'The Anatomist at Home: The Great Windmill Street Anatomy School and Museum

A correspondent in the St James’s Chronicle in 1779 remarked of William Hunter’s museum at 16 Great Windmill Street, London, ‘Being much visited and extolled by Foreigners, I am more surprised that it hath not been more taken Notice of by English Writers’. Despite this apparent neglect by British visitors, those who did enter Hunter’s house alluded to its ‘temple-like’ structure, and its classical past, but this museum was far from archaic. Surveying Robert Mylne’s original architectural plans for Windmill Street, its spatial organisation appears to be derived from a model of the collection storehouse, a modern and reasoned ‘centre of calculation’ (Latour, 1987). This paper ‘reconstructs’ Hunter’s house, with its marble fireplaces and painted ceilings to reveal within its design an extremely efficient anatomy theatre, museum and domestic house. Hunter imagined his ‘great school’ of anatomy as an, expression of ‘publick magnificence’ (Gwynn, 1766) and that his collections, of natural history, coins and medals, old master paintings, drawings, and prints, might reflect this ambition overall. When he died, the French physician, Felix Vick d’Azyr, lamented that Hunter’s demise also brought with it the expiration of the collection: ‘In the midst of his cabinet, Mr. Hunter was the most learned; and his collection itself took on a new meaning. Now the chain of all these truths is broken; all is silent in this vast structure’, connecting Hunter profoundly to the very materiality of his Great Windmill Street interiors