Among those who flung open the windows of the Enlightenment, John Hunter deserves a special place. Anatomist, collector, surgeon, teacher and reluctant sufferer of fools, he never achieved in his life the status of a sage. No sooner was his body cold than rivals started to pour scorn; his own brother-in-law, the egregious Everard Home, stole his papers, made a career out of pilfering the ideas they contained, then burnt them lest he be detected.

Yet Hunter was without doubt a genius, the first surgeon to trust his eyes rather than the hand-me-downs of Hippocrates and Galen. In his lifetime he dissected thousands of bodies, mostly delivered under cover of darkness, packed in a hamper, by the “Resurrectionists” — grave robbers who snatched the bodies from the earth as soon as the mourning family had turned their backs. Children, known as “smalls”, were charged for by the inch.

It was a grim trade, matched in horror only by the spectacle of body-hunters fighting over the corpses of felons hanged at Tyburn. Hanging was then so inefficient a method of “turning off” the condemned that more than once they sprang to life again on the anatomist’s slab. On one occasion Hunter deliberately attempted to revive a man, the Rev William Dodd, hanged for a fraud despite pleas for clemency from Dr Johnson. But Dodd had been too long dead by the time Hunter began to pump air into his lungs with a pair of bellows, and he could not be revived.

Hunter and his elder brother William came from an impoverished farm close to Glasgow. Both achieved eminence, William as a society physician and obstetrician, and John as a much rougher but more brilliant diamond. He helped William to set up a school of anatomy, then joined the Royal Navy as a surgeon, discovering that musket balls that had penetrated the body were best left there to allow the flesh to heal around them.

Well aware of the limitations of surgery, John Hunter operated only if there was no alternative. Without anaesthetics, surgeons had to be quick and dexterous, so all that practice with dead bodies paid off. But Hunter also dissected animals in their thousands in a pioneering study of comparative anatomy. Nothing excited him more than news that a rare creature in a menagerie was looking peaky. Once he rushed into a friend’s office begging a loan of five guineas to buy a tiger that was dying near by.

His ideas were revolutionary, anticipating the theories of Darwin that followed a century later. He tried transplants, preserving bodies by freezing, and artificial insemination. He inspired a generation of followers, including Edward Jenner, founder of vaccination. His life was protean, his energy boundless, his temper uncertain. His home was the inspiration for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, his personality the template for Dr Dolittle. His memorial is the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, a colossal Cabinet of Curiosities packed with the impedimenta of an inveterate collector.

Wendy Moore has done justice to this marvellous man in a biography packed with gruesome facts and eye-opening perceptions. It is an accomplished achievement and a splendid read. If ever you wondered why surgeons are so full of themselves, this account of the founder of their profession might provide some clues.

The Hunterian Museum at 35-43 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2, reopens today after refurbishment

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