Showing posts with label surgery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label surgery. Show all posts

Tuesday 11 June 2013

Get me a Retrospectascope...Stat!: John Hunter

Hunterian Museum
‘No theory can ever be proved true - we can only show that a theory is false’ - Karl Popper
I've been meaning to do something specific on John Hunter (13 February 1728 – 16 October 1793) for some time and though there have been a couple of posts that touch on him, I've not written anything explicit. Indeed my course in the spring used his collection of curios at the Royal College of Surgeons as a point of departure for many themes coming out of ‘exhibiting the body’. Therefore the excellent talk presented by Professor Stephen Challacombe at the RSM provided the material for this post.

The simple question that he wanted to explore focused on the relevancy of John Hunter’s approach to science and research. What was so special or different about his methods?