William Hunter and his Eighteenth-Century Cultural Worlds: The Anatomist and the Fine Arts

This book concerns the interconnections between the fine arts and design, medical history, natural history and the natural sciences in Britain over the long eighteenth-century. It focuses on the wide-ranging collections of Dr. William Hunter (1718-1783) first Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts and founder of the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow. This book is the first to examine how Hunter's practice of anatomy, in particular, intersected with a cultural fascination for the relationship between fine art and design practice and natural philosophy during this period. The study combines research methodologies developed from art and design history, anthropology and material culture studies, reflecting the anatomist's own interdisciplinary interests. It takes the form of a close cultural biography, paying particular attention to the anatomist's social, political and educational roles, an 'anthropological-cultural' approach appropriate to Hunter's own working methods. Research for the book involved a synthesis of primary and secondary sources that often incorporated the minutiae of daily life, correspondences, inventories, business records and family papers, forming a micro-historical working process characteristic of material culture studies