Transcript of a Lecture to the Royal Western Yacht Club on 23 February 2000

A Surgical Journey: from rags in Bodmin to riches in London

Kenneth R. Hunter MD, FRCP

Honorary Consultant Physician, Derriford Hospital, Plymouth PL6 8DH

Thank you for asking me to speak here again. When Tony Dyer approached me he said that he wanted something on local medical history. The last time I spoke mainly about Plymouth doctors: this time I thought that I'd tell you about someone who was not medically qualified but he made a tremendous contribution to medical science. He was a local boy (if you can call someone from Bodmin local) who made good in the London medical scene or more accurately the surgical scene.

It is appropriate to talk about this now as this year marks the two hundredth anniversary of the Royal College of Surgeons that evolved from the Company of Surgeons in 1800. One of the glories of the Royal College of Surgeon’s building in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is the museum, which was built up by the eighteenth century surgeon John Hunter, and the boy from Bodmin played a very important part in its development.

Hunter is regarded as the founder of scientific surgery. He was born on fourteenth February 1728: last week was his birthday and that is why the College chose the fourteenth of February to begin the celebrations of its second centenary.

John Hunter was not only a good technical surgeon, but also a colossus in the world of biological science and he is remembered for that just as much as for his clinical skills.

I should like to start with some background to my talk by giving you an outline of the life and work of John Hunter, touching on a local link which tells us a great deal about him. Then I shall speak about William Clift from Bodmin who is the main subject of my talk. I shall also mention another couple of local connexions with the events in the story.

Incidentally, the name Hunter is such a revered name among doctors that I have, at interviews to gain entrance to medical school and on many other occasions since, often been asked if I was related to my eminent namesake. The answer is “no”. My association with the subject is solely my fascination with medical history, especially that of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

John Hunter

The story starts at Long Calderwood Farm in East Kilbride, a village next to Hamilton, a few miles south of Glasgow, in the early eighteenth century. The farmer there was called John Hunter and he had ten children. The first was born in 1708 and, as was the custom, he was also called John, but as so often happened he died when he was only fourteen years old. Four other children were also to die young.

The first son to survive into adult life, James, was born in 1715. He was a bright lad at school. The local school had high academic standards - Latin was the language of instruction after age nine - he went on to read law at Glasgow University and would probably have been a very successful lawyer if he had not died from tuberculosis when he was thirty.

The next son, William, was three years younger. He was perhaps even more successful at school than James and went to Glasgow University, destined for career in the church. He completed the course with distinction but received no degree as he decided to renounce the ministry and instead he decided to move to Hamilton where he became an apprentice to William Cullen who was in practice as a doctor there. He went on to study anatomy in Edinburgh and then, with Cullen’s full support, went on, by sea, from Edinburgh to London where he moved in with James Douglas, who was a leading teacher of anatomy. This led to William Hunter himself becoming a renowned teacher of anatomy and he succeeded Douglas in the anatomy school, which was part of Douglas’ house in Covent Garden.

At this stage it is appropriate to say something about the lucrative private anatomy schools, which sprang up in London at this time. An Act of Henry VIII in 1540 granted an exclusive right to teach anatomy to the Company of Barbers and Surgeons. The Company was allowed to dissect the bodies of four executed criminals each year and this was the only legal teaching of practical anatomy. The Company zealously guarded its monopoly. However in 1745 it was decided that the trade of hairdressing was separate from the profession of surgery and an independent Company of Surgeons was created. Simultaneously there was a huge demand for surgeons for the armed forces which increased the need for anatomy teaching. The new Company of Surgeons did not enforce its right to the monopoly, therefore private schools sprang up. The chief source of bodies for dissection remained executed criminals, but the families of these people did their utmost to prevent this and there was a great deal of bribery of prison staff and violent attacks on people moving corpses. The doctors employed the their own teams of strong-armed men.

When supplies of fresh corpses were poor, grave-robbing was an alternative: corpses had to be fresh as there was no efficient refrigeration available. Therefore families often arranged for a guard on the grave for a short time after the burial. Occasionally a corpse would arrive completely fresh with no evidence of disease and a blind eye would be turned. Needless to say the urbane William Hunter, who was also pursuing a glittering career in midwifery, looking after people of elevated social status had no direct dealings with such activities.

But we are getting too far ahead. Let us return to East Kilbride and the Hunter family there. Two daughters survived into adult life and then, finally another son was born on fourteenth February 1728. By this time the first born, John had died so the youngest child was also given his father's name. How would this John Hunter compare with his distinguished older brothers? Well, he was hopeless at school. He certainly never learnt any Latin so he could not take part in classes after the age of nine. Even before that he showed a positive distaste for the classroom. Instead he avoided school and spent his days rambling in the woods, looking after birds’ nests, comparing their eggs, recording the number, size and markings. He was particularly interested in fish.

After his father died his mother seemed to have no control over him so he left school at thirteen. His mother became exasperated by his behaviour; his apparently indolent obsession with the natural history of the countryside. Therefore he was sent to stay with his sister, Janet, in Glasgow where she was the wife of a cabinet-maker called Buchanan. There he learnt the skills of a carpenter, but soon his sister became ill with tuberculosis and Buchanan went bankrupt because of alcohol. Therefore John decided to go and join his brother William in London. He set off on horseback saying that if he could not find work he would join the Army instead.

In London he quickly adapted to life in his brother's anatomy school and there he found his métier. He worked as an assistant and the street-wise John built up an excellent rapport with the body-snatchers and grave-robbers upon whom his brother depended. He helped with dissections and his skills as a carpenter together with his experience in the countryside where he had been used to examining dead animals meant that he had a natural flair for the work. Within a year he had become a pupil of the great surgeon William Cheseldon at the Royal Hospital Chelsea and later he was a student at Saint George's Hospital. William wanted John to acquire some cultural polish, so in 1755 he arranged for him to study at Oxford, but he could not cope with that system of academic study - especially the Latin - and he only lasted for a couple of months.

He returned to London, worked there as a house surgeon at Saint George's Hospital in 1756 and then worked both as a surgeon and in anatomy research with his brother. His anatomical studies particularly concentrated on comparative anatomy; comparing different species and how different structures are developed to undertake different functions. He was always thinking about how and why things happen. The ethos of the time, especially among physicians, was that one should be well read, especially about the classical authors, and that their authoritative writings were then accepted as fact. However Hunter’s attitude was later summed up in a letter to one of his former pupils, William Jenner (who subsequently established vaccination against small pox), when he said “Why do you ask me a question, by the way of solving it…why not try the experiment?” As a place to try his experiments, in 1760 he leased some land out in the country, at Earl’s Court so that he could make it into a menagerie full of exotic animals.

Later the same year he decided to leave his brother’s employment and to join the Army. There were probably three main reasons for this:

i) to earn money that he would need if he were to build up his collection of specimens for the menagerie,

ii) to gain surgical experience,

iii) to gain a proper medical qualification which was effectively denied to him by his lack of Latin. The armed services were in great need of doctors, especially surgeons, and they had a mechanism by which people could obtain qualifications more easily than was possible in civilian life.

His first experience of action was in 1761 at a place, which I think will be familiar to many of you. It was during the Seven Years War and the task was to capture Belle Ile (off Quiberon). There were seven thousand troops under Major-General Hodgson, transported by Commodore Viscount Keppel in ten ships of the line, eight frigates and about eighty other ships. There was also a covering squadron hovering off Brest. They were opposed by a garrison of less than three thousand and the British were so confident of success that many officers had brought their wives or mistresses along to watch the battle and then to organise a victory ball!

The island was protected by rocks and strong currents and the French Commander deluded the enemy by parading farmers along the cliff tops on dray horses to give the impression of strength and in addition the women, wearing red caps sat upon cows in the fields to increase the apparent numbers of cavalry! The initial landing failed, but Pitt sent reinforcements and after a long blockade the French finally gave in.

During the occupation of the island John did not seem to get on with any of his medical colleagues, with the exception of a certain fellow lowland Scot, Robert Home. He was another army surgeon and his forebearers were the same Earls of Home that in 1963 gave us the fourteenth Earl who became Prime Minister after Harold Macmillan. John spent his time studying the marine life on the foreshore and the behaviour of lizards, especially when hibernating. Later he moved with the Army to Portugal and then after the Treaty of Paris he retired on half-pay. In 1763 he returned to London where he set about building up both his surgical practice and his scientific collection.

At Earl’s Court, which became his country house where he spent most weekends he supervised the physiological experiments on the collection of exotic animals which he kept there. This was the proving ground for his new ideas. At his town house he set out to build a museum, which would be his showpiece. Up until then museums had mostly been unsystematic collections of curiosities. If there ever was an attempt at classification it was on a rigid, static concept that species were immutable. Hunter however had a dynamic view connecting structure with function and showing how animals adapt to their surroundings.

His dominating theme was that there are uniform general principles that apply to all matter - inanimate and animate - including mankind. He wrote, “ It should be remembered that nothing in nature stands alone, but every art and science has a relation to some other art or science.” He felt that “every property in man is similar to some property either in another animal or probably in a vegetable… Thereby man becomes classable with those in some of his parts.” This advanced thinking was dangerous stuff in the eighteenth century. Today we take for granted that mankind is an integral part of the total environment in which we live (the popular press assumes that the ordinary reader can grasp that genetic modification of vegetables could affect man and diseases such as HIV and CJD can jump from animals to man). But Hunter was working more than fifty years before Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and there were severe legal penalties for anyone who denied the strict Biblical description of Creation. Therefore many of Hunter’s views were held discreetly by him during his lifetime and his writings on this were deliberately suppressed until about seventy years after his death.

However there were no such inhibitions on other aspects of his work and he was well known for his theories on the growth of teeth, the nature of blood, the nature of inflammation, the treatment of gun-shot wounds and much else. He was often years ahead of his time, for example he did some quite complex work on what we would now call transplant surgery and, something of particular interest to yachtsmen and yachtswomen, he also studied hypothermia, which was a major interest which seemed to stem from his observations on the hibernating lizards on Belle Ile.

As far his surgical practice was concerned, Hunter always regarded the need for a surgical operation as an indication of failure of other methods. In those pre-anaesthetic days with no understanding of the importance of asepsis surgery was a very hazardous procedure. However his skill was considerable, his results good and his students adored him, both at Saint George's Hospital where they acted as apprentices and at his private surgical lectures which he read twice weekly on a course from October to April each year.

Hunter’s daily routine began at 6.00 AM when he began dissection and preparation of the anatomical specimens for his museum. He also instructed his museum assistants about their duties for the rest of the day. He had breakfast at 9.00 AM and then he saw his private patients in his own house for most of the rest of the morning. His attitude to private patients was unorthodox. The order in which he picked patients from the waiting room was not according to when they had arrived or according to their social status but according to their needs. Therefore a journeyman who was losing money while away from work was seen quickly but an aristocrat for whom the wait had no financial penalty was kept until the end. As far as fees went he did well enough (about £6,000 per year) but not as well as many other surgeons who were on about £20,000. This was because he always stated a fixed fee at the beginning, there were never any hidden extras and he adjusted downwards for people of limited means. There was an occasion when someone had delayed for two months before coming for planned surgery. When Hunter discovered that this was because of difficulty in raising the fee he immediately reduced it from twenty guineas to one guinea. After consulting at home he went off in his carriage to conduct house calls on other private patients and then spent the rest of the afternoon at Saint George's Hospital. At 4.00 PM he returned for dinner. He ate well but unlike many contemporaries was a modest drinker, only having a single glass of wine. He then rested for an hour before settling in for an evening of writing often dictating to his pupils and assistants until midnight or later. He then slept for four or five hours.

Much of his energy was devoted to building up his collection for the museum and most of his income went recklessly towards this. He would go to extraordinary lengths to obtain individual items. The story is told that one of his former students, Dr John Clarke, who was practising in a neighbouring part of London, had an unusual anatomical specimen with which he refused to part. Hunter apparently said “Well then, take care that I don’t meet you with it on some dark lane at night for if I do I’ll murder you to get it.”

As his collection expanded (it had over thirteen thousand specimens at the time of his death) he needed more space and in 1783 he moved into a large house on the East side of Leicester Square where the Odeon Cinema now stands. Behind was a garden and beyond that the back of another house, which fronted on to what is now called Charing Cross Road (just up from the National Portrait Gallery). This house was used for preparing specimens and as living accommodation for pupils and assistants. On the garden between the houses he built a lecture theatre and accommodation for the bulk of his museum, which included a huge glass roof over his largest exhibits such as the skulls of whales.

The house in Leicester Square was large and elegant and it was a major centre for London social life. The main salon could accommodate an orchestra and one hundred guests. The hub of this social life was his wife, Anne. He had met her on his return from the Army. She was the daughter of the surgeon, Robert Home with whom he had become friendly on Belle Ile. She seems to have complemented him perfectly. The Homes were a cultivated and attractive family. Anne was “tall and slender, a beauty both ethereal and sensuous, a harpsichordist, composer and painter as well as a poet (she wrote most of the words for the dozen canzonettas that her friend Joseph Hayden composed while he was in London)... Her presence at social gatherings was catalytic.” Their engagement had lasted for seven years and they were eventually married in 1771. He was forty-three, she was twenty-nine. This was only ten days after Captain James Cook had returned in Endeavour from his first circumnavigation of the world, which had lasted for almost three years and both Cook and his fellow explorer, the naturalist Joseph Banks were guests at the wedding. Needless to say many of the specimens, which Banks had brought back, including a kangaroo, found their way into Hunter’s collection.

It seems to have been a blissfully happy marriage. Anne put up with double-headed babies, fossils, mummies, skeletons, students and stuffed giraffes as the smells of the dissecting room mingled with the perfume of the salon during her afternoon conversiaziones and her evening soirées. In turn her husband supported her activities although typically he did not attend for the full duration of her Wednesday evening functions. A contemporary recorded the scene when “ he issued from his study on one of Mrs Hunter’s reception nights…he would stop to give a kindly greeting to the beauty of the year, had a smart reply to the passing joke of a man of fashion, or a more serious response to the question of an administrator.” He liked music and he said that its effect on the mind was as important as food on the body. However his passion for his work meant that he would slip away and settle down to writing with his assistants until the early hours of the morning.

Sir Joshua Reynolds

One of the people of distinction who frequented the Hunters’ soirées lived on the opposite side of Leicester Square. This was Sir Joshua Reynolds, by then the greatly revered first president of the Royal Academy, but originally from Plympton, son of the schoolmaster there and his first studio had been over his sister's milliners shop in Devonport. Anne wanted a portrait of her husband, but of course he was always too busy to sit. He did manage time for a sketch in 1786 but it was unsatisfactory. He had five sittings in 1789 but as he was so scruffy with his dishevelled beard the omens were not good. Anne and Reynolds hatched a plot to get him to shave, which he was reluctant to do. Reynolds intrigued him by telling him about the technique for live facial plaster casts. This fascinated Hunter as he was always measuring various structures of the body and he was very keen to have his own cast made. But then he was told that it would be very painful for someone with a beard! The result was that he shaved and by using the cast Reynolds produced a portrait, which now hangs in the Royal College of Surgeons. From the portrait we can confirm much about what Hunter regarded as important. Reynolds’ subjects often chose their own particular items to accompany them in their pictures. Among the things chosen by Hunter were:

i) a chart showing a graded series illustrating his interest in comparative anatomy (the chart shows the head and the hands and emphasises the differences in the structures, which correspond to different functions: the skulls are of a European, an Australian aborigine, a chimpanzee, a monkey, a dog and a crocodile; the forelegs are of a horse, ox, pig, donkey, monkey and man);

ii) manuscripts (“The Natural History of Vegetables” and “The Natural History of Fossils”) on Botany and Geology which show that clearly his manuscripts were important to him and he was keen that they should be known to posterity;

iii) anatomical preparations (he was skilled at making these and the chosen example is a cast of part of a lung;

iv) diagrams about the blood vessels, which were one of his major surgical interests; and

v) an example of a bone graft.

William Clift

That was the background to our story; this scientific giant of a man in fashionable London, that is an intellectual giant, in stature he was only 5 ft 2 in tall. In the days before word processors and photocopiers someone like Hunter needed assistants who could accurately write up his notes and draw the anatomical and other preparations, which were made on the premises. Hunter had relied heavily on the talented artist William Bell but after eight years he had obtained a surgical qualification of his own and left to work abroad.

Anne Hunter had a school friend, Nancy Hosken, the daughter of the Vicar of Bodmin. By then she was the wife of Colonel Gilbert who was a descendant of Walter Raleigh and he had an official position as Gentleman of the King’s bedchamber. Therefore the Gilberts made frequent visits to London, from Bodmin, and as adults the two school friends were able to keep in close touch with each other. When Anne Hunter mentioned her husband's need for an assistant Nancy Gilbert thought that she might have the solution and suggested a boy from Bodmin called William Clift.

He was the youngest of at least seven children. His father was a Miller and he was born at the mill at Burcombe just outside Bodmin. Apparently his father could “ read well and write very tolerably which was much more than many of...that period.” We shall see that this respect in the family for literacy turns out to be important for our story.

His father died when he was nine and his mother was able to earn only 4d a day carding and spinning wool in the winter and working in the fields in the summer. In spite of the poverty she managed 3d a week to keep William at school until she died just before his twelfth birthday. Then he had to leave and was employed at a nursery where he said that he became a tolerable botanist. However his boss, Mr King was a great lover of brandy and on one occasion when he was drunk on his horse he chased William with a stick. William escaped by scurrying along the narrow, twisting paths among the cucumbers and geranium cuttings. The horse could not follow and as a result Mr King was thrown with a great loss of dignity. William had a natural artistic talent so he drew a caricature of the episode and sold it for a shilling to the foreman who showed it around the town. This greatly increased William’s reputation as an artist however Mr King failed to appreciate the joke and William no longer had a full-time job! He then managed to get odd jobs from a local businessman and went on living in Bodmin with his sisters, Elizabeth who was eighteen years older and took the place of his mother and Joanna who was ten years older.

He seems to have been a lively young rascal, full of mischief. When the church belfry door was left unlocked he nipped in and set the bells ringing while the ringers were relaxing in a nearby pub. He was a frequent visitor to the kitchens of Mrs Gilbert’s home (The Priory) where he was a great favourite of the maids who worked there and he used to draw for them on the flag-stones with chalk. Therefore Mrs Gilbert was well aware of William’s reputation as an artist.

So this was the lad for whom Mrs Gilbert arranged formal indentures so that he could go to London and become properly trained in scientific drawing. One of his enduring qualities was his meticulous desire to write accurately and to communicate clearly. When he wrote letters he would write in draft first and keep copies. He also filed away the letters that he received. His mania for collecting and cataloguing was to stand him in good stead in his work with Hunter, but it also means that we have his family correspondence [The Clift Family correspondence, 1792-1846, editor Frances Austin; Centre for English Cultural Tradition & Language, The University of Sheffield, 1991] and this gives a fascinating picture of life in the West Country and in London at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The first letter from William in this collection of correspondence was written on the first Sunday after his arrival in London. It was to his sister Elizabeth who had accompanied him as far as Fowey where he boarded a sailing ship. He gives a vivid description of the voyage: “ I have a thousand things to write and I can't tell you where to begin first – But I think I’ll begin from the time I left Fowey - Just as we was getting out of the Harbour I saw you and Cousin Bank the other side and I look’d and look’d and look’d again till you look’d so small that I cou’d not discern you scarcely only your red cloak, when we got out at the Harbours mouth the vessel began to tumble and pitch finely but I did not get sick until we were past Eddy stone…I saw a little of Plymouth but we were a great way from it.” He went on to describe passing The Isle of Wight, Dungeness, Deal, Margate and eventually Woolwich. He then went on foot with one of the crew to fetch a boat to tow the ship into London on the evening tide.

The ship had reached London on the evening tide of Tuesday, fourteenth February 1792: it was John Hunter’s sixty-fourth birthday and it was William Clift’s seventeenth.

A fortnight later he was able to write another very excited, but much fuller letter with his first impressions of London life in general and of John Hunter in particular. He found Hunter to be “a very curious man and plain as well for he has hair as white as snow and he has never got it drest, I believe there is not a bit of pride in him and all his clothes so plain (… that I am sure you wou’d not think he was such a grand gentleman).” He then continued: “ I suppose you have heard tell of Sir Joshua Reynolds that fine Painter well he will never draw any more for he is dead and buried at Saint Paul's church on Saturday last.” In the funeral procession which included the Lord Mayor, the Sheriffs and the City Marshall all in red and gold lace, Duke's of all sorts and gentlemen, there were almost one hundred and twenty coaches “ it was the finest sight I ever saw in my life at that time.”

However in the next day he was even more impressed because at Saint James’ he saw the King, Queen and three daughters and afterwards he was taken to Westminster Abbey “which was the finest place I ever saw and the Monuments, well ‘tis no use to tell, I wish you was here to see it.” He ended his letter “please to remember me to Priory Maids.”

William quickly settled in to the routine of the Hunter establishment and enthusiastically pursued the drawing lessons which were arranged for him; although when he wrote to Elizabeth at Christmas he ruefully reported that his drawings were not yet up to the standard of the others in Hunter’s collection. On Sundays he often accompanied Hunter to Earl’s Court where he had a particular project involving bees.

Back home in Bodmin Elizabeth was alone in the family house and Joanna was in service. She seems to have been rather flighty girl and she never stayed very long in any one post.

For William all was going very well both professionally and socially. Mrs Gilbert continued to take an interest and she would see him during her visits to London and then give favourable reports to Elizabeth when she returned to Bodmin. Through all this the family correspondence continued.

On eighteenth October 1793 William wrote to Elizabeth. He started by saying that he was at a loss for words to express his ideas. Mr Hunter had gone out at midday on the sixteenth as usual but had forgotten his list of addresses to be visited. The butler sent William to chase after the coach with this and when he caught up he saw Hunter getting into the coach “as well as ever I saw him in my life.” He was on his way to a board meeting at Saint George's Hospital. However at the meeting he was suddenly taken very ill and he died within an hour or two. William went on to describe the intense grief in the family and then he turned to his own concerns about his apprenticeship. “ I am afraid our house will be turned quite upside down now the wall and support is gone… I should like to live in London very much but I don't think I should like any master as well as Mr Hunter. Perhaps Mr Home might take me to serve out my time with him to look after the dissecting rooms but then all my future hopes of learning to draw would be quite put a stop to, and I suppose I should never learn Anatomy under him for he is quite a different man from Mr Hunter as Mrs Gilbert well knows.”

Hunter had been known to suffer from coronary artery disease of his heart and it seems that the tensions surrounding the Board meeting where John was at odds with his fellow surgeons about arrangements for teaching students had precipitated a fatal heart attack. The young William’s extremely perspicacious remark about Mr Home refers to Anne Hunter’s younger brother Everard who was to be one of the executors of the will. He, like his father, was a surgeon (indeed soon after qualifying he served for some time at the Royal Naval Hospital in Stonehouse). In the previous year Hunter had asked Everard, who was not only his brother-in-law but also his former student, to start giving the annual course of lectures in surgery for him and he did this by reading from Hunter’s manuscript.

His master’s death upset William greatly. Later he was to write that he was “one of the best and honestest men that I can conceive God ever made: one who died too soon for the world and me, while I was still an urchin in knowledge and had long been a fatherless and motherless orphan, when he kindly accepted me as an apprentice without fee, reward or premium.” He was keen to go to his master's funeral but the household was in chaos. There was a staff of fifty at Leicester Square and Earl’s Court. There was no ready cash. The museum collection was thought to be worth £20,000 (it had cost more than double that). Hunter’s property was worth about £10,000 but his debts were £19,000. William was not able to obtain his mourning clothes in time so he was not able to take part in the funeral. Unlike the Reynolds' funeral this was a very modest affair. He described it in a letter to Elizabeth. It took place at Saint Martin's in the fields. There was only the hearse and two coaches. None of the servants went to the burying but William knew the undertaker who took him into the church and hid him in the vault underneath. William wrote “none of our of people saw me there I believe and I did not want them to.”

It was felt important to keep the museum intact. Therefore the executors of Hunter’s will, his brother-in-law Everard Home and his nephew Matthew Baillie set about trying to sort out the estate according to Hunter’s will by arranging the sale of the scientific collection to a government that was already fully stretched financially due to war with France. Meanwhile William set about the lonely task of trying to preserve the collection in the back house, the lease on the Leicester Square house having been given up and John's widow having moved to a modest house in Blackheath. He had an income of £5 per year plus his clothes and in addition seven shillings a week to make-up for the board, which he had previously received in kind. Just keeping the collection going - alcohol to preserve the specimens was a major item - was reckoned to cost £100 a year. He went hungry in order to do this and he managed to supplement his meagre resources by free-lance writing and drawing for Matthew Baillie and others. Mrs Gilbert would give him the odd five shillings when she visited London. In addition he seems to have had a presentiment that it was important to copy out as much as possible of John Hunter’s writings for his own improvement and paper for this was very expensive. On the top of everything else he also occasionally sent money to Elizabeth who had been evicted from the family home and eventually had to go into service herself.

By 1796 things began to improve a little and William became more optimistic that he would be able to stay with his beloved collection rather than need to branch out on a new career. A special parliamentary committee was set up to reconsider buying the museum for the nation and after three years a price of £15,000 was agreed and the collection was transferred to what was about to become The Royal College of Surgeons. This was at the end of 1799. Before the museum changed hands Home asked Clift for all Hunter’s notes in order to create a catalogue. Clift was suspicious and managed to delay for about a year while he frantically transcribed more and more of the notes: he eventually managed to copy about half of them before taking them as a cart-load to Home’s house. The College of Surgeons appointed Clift as Conservator of the collection in recognition of all that he had done to keep it intact. His salary was £80 a year.

During all this time Joanna was moving from place to place in search of better wages and a more satisfying position. By 1795 she was in Liskeard and then she moved to Plymouth in 1796. She worked for the Lynes family in New Church Lane. She pressed Elizabeth to come and work there too, which she eventually did at the end of 1798. Joanna seemed to stay with the Lynes for longer than most jobs, although for three months in 1799 she moved to work for Admiral Valiants in George Street after a rather melodramatic misunderstanding with a fellow servant who apparently threatened daily to poison her because of a quarrel over a boyfriend.

The next year (in 1800) Joanna fulfilled a long held dream that she should move to London where servant’s wages were even higher. Just as her brother had done in 1792 she wrote back to Elizabeth to tell of her safe arrival by sea from Plymouth. She had been very sea-sick, but she seems to have used her feminine charms on the captain who looked after her particularly closely – “ if he had been my father a thousand times over he could not have done more for me” and by the time the ship reached London Bridge she had completely recovered.” There followed a most touching description in her letter of her arrival at William’s house at the museum and how she did not recognise the London gentleman at the door as he had changed so much from the boy who had left Bodmin eight years earlier. She also described her astonishment at seeing the inside of the house which, although large, had “ scarce room to sleep as it is so occkeypied (sic) with Surgeanry Combustables…there,s thousands of large bottles with both Fleash fish and fowls preserved in spirits…with a quantity of scelletons great and small.”

As time went on Home was urged to produce a catalogue but none came. He was a good lecturer and at first he acknowledged Hunter as the source of his information but this soon stopped. Clift became increasingly convinced that Home was plagiarising Hunter’s work. Remember, unknown to Home, Clift had kept copies of much of Hunter’s work and could compare these with Home’s publications.

Honours were heaped upon Home. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a drinking crony of the Prince Regent. He earned over £20,000 a year as a surgeon. His attitude to fees was different from Hunter’s. For years he treated his long-standing friend, the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks free in the expectation that he would receive a legacy. When he didn't he billed the estate for £4,000, and he collected the money!

The long-awaited catalogue never came and in 1823 Home casually remarked to Clift that he had destroyed the manuscripts. Later he was to say that this was Hunter’s wish (which seems highly improbable when we remember that some of them were included in the Reynolds’ portrait). The Trustees of the Museum were informed and were furious. Clift guessed that Home had kept back some manuscripts for further plunder, but Home insisted to the Trustees that everything had gone up in flames. This was typical of his dishonesty because he did produce a few manuscripts some time later. Then after his death in 1832 his son, a Captain in the Royal Navy, produced twelve more parcels, which he had found among his father's possessions, including The Natural History of Vegetables!

One of the manuscripts that were never returned was the lecture notes for Hunter’s annual course on surgery. The Royal College of Surgeons appealed for former students to give it copies of their own notes that they had taken during the lectures and probably the most complete example was the notes made in shorthand by James Parkinson in 1785. This was the James Parkinson who was later to describe what we now know as Parkinson's disease. However, this and all the other fragments of students’ notes collected by the College only gave an incomplete picture of what Hunter actually said.

This is where Plymouth comes into the picture again. The Plymouth Medical Society is one of the oldest in the Country; its records go back for over two hundred years. Therefore you can imagine the excitement in the Society when in 1981 one of our hospital consultants, John Stafford who had been a professor at Saint George's Hospital in London and also the Society’s honorary librarian was told that that a leather-bound volume belonging to the Society had been rediscovered among a collection of old books in a basement at Plympton Hospital. It was a complete set of contemporary notes made by a student at Hunter’s 1781 lectures. This student was the same John Clarke that Hunter had later in jest threatened to kill in order to obtain a specimen for his collection. On the front page there is confirmation signed by John Hunter that Clarke had attended the lectures.

Clift went on as conservator of the museum, extending the collection until he retired in 1842, handing over to his son-in-law, Richard Owen. His work was increasingly recognised by the scientific community, for example he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. Interestingly his first communication to that Society in 1823 was a description of fossilised bones discovered in limestone quarries in Oreston during the construction of the breakwater. His salary gradually increased from £80 to £400 a year but it was not just money that was important. In a letter in 1822 to Joanna who was by then married and back in Cornwall he wrote that he was being kept exceptionally busy in the museum, “ This increase of business brings no increase of income but only credit for being better acquainted with various subjects... than other people; it gives me the opportunity of associating with and being looked up to by those who are infinitely my superiors in everything else and has been the means of my being admitted a member of several societies into which many who have large fortunes cannot get admittance…but as it was by being more industrious than other people that Mr Hunter acquired his reputation though not riches I cannot do better than follow his example when I find that I must get that or nothing and think myself very well off too.”

Clift died in 1849 and was buried in Highgate cemetery in North London. His son-in-law, Richard Owen had an epitaph chiselled:

“ He carried a child-like simplicity and single-mindedness to the close of a long and honoured career”

Postscript

That could have been the end of this story, but ten years later in January 1859 a young army surgeon in the Life Guards was idly looking at the Times newspaper in the mess at Windsor barracks. The surgeon’s father had been a great admirer of the work of John Hunter. Therefore his eye caught an advertisement: due to overcrowding in the vaults at Saint Martin's in the fields, where William had hidden to watch the funeral, the coffins had to be cleared out and removed to the catacombs. He knew that Hunter’s coffin was in vault number three. He hurried to Saint Martin's and found it absolutely full right up to the roof. He had the unpleasant task lasting for days of searching through over three thousand often leaking coffins before coming upon Hunter’s well preserved one.

He wrote a letter to The Lancet and mobilised opinion. As a result John Hunter’s coffin was removed and reinterred with great ceremony, at the expense of the Royal College of Surgeons, in Westminster Abbey. That is where his remains lie to this day; the spot is marked by a suitable monument alongside the other monuments in the Abbey that so overwhelmed young William Clift when he first arrived in London from Bodmin in 1792.