Tooth transplants and pickled penises: inside the revamped Hunterian
When he wasn’t wrestling his pet bull, slicing open the corpses of freshly hanged criminals, or studying the seasonal changes in sparrow testicles, John Hunter could be found probing the nether regions of female silk moths. The 18th-century surgeon, anatomist and all-round polymath was keen to find out if he could artificially inseminate the moths’ eggs by smearing them with male moths’ semen, using a tiny camel-hair brush. He could, and he did: eight eggs hatched successfully, in the first known example of IVF. “Thus then I ascertained,” he wrote, “that the eggs could be impregnated by art.” Emboldened by his findings, he went on to apply the same principle to humans, completing the first recorded artificial insemination in 1790, paving the way for modern fertility treatments.
The tiny moth eggs and silkworms – along with several human foetuses – are now displayed in little, one of London’s most extraordinary attractions, which finally reopens next week after a six-year revamp. The £4.6m project, part of a wider on Lincoln’s Inn Fields by Hawkins Brown architects, has reinstated the museum to its original footprint and breathed dazzling new life into this fascinating cabinet of curiosities.We learn about Hunter’s country house in the then-rural area of Earl’s Court, where he kept an astonishing menagerie of creatures that he would conduct experiments on – and flay open at the end of their lives. “On the right of the house is the conservatory for his bees,” one visitor remarked. “On the left artificial rocks on which live eagles were chained.” It was a , populated by geese, pigeons, rabbits, pigs, opossums, hedgehogs, buffaloes, leopards, dormice, bats, snakes, deer, fish, frogs, leeches, eels and mussels, as well as a jackal, a zebra and an ostrich – most of which would meet a sticky end in his preservation jars. A grassy mound at the bottom of the garden, meanwhile, housed two dens of lions. None seemed to intimidate the great scalpel-wielder. When a pair of leopards once broke loose, according to a contemporary account in the Times, “Hunter appeared on the scene and without a moment’s reflection, seized both animals and chained them up in their cages.”
