Another tale is told of his intervention between fighting dogs and leopards, he dragging the infuriated leopards back to their cage by their collars--and _fainting_ when the feat was accomplished, for his was not a burly frame, and his heart was in a threatening condition.
An element of humour mingles with the gruesome in Sir B. W. Richardson's account of the ruse employed to cheat watchful executors, and obtain the body of O'Brien the Irish Giant,[2] so as to convert it into the skeleton now in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln's Inn.
Those were the days when surgeons were not particular where they obtained subjects for their scalpels, whether from the resurrection men or from the gallows, and John Hunter was not more dainty than his fellows. But also from travelling shows and menageries, and from animals that died in the Tower he was supplied. And so rapidly did his museum grow, absorbing the bulk of his income, that ere long he had to remove to what is now Leicester Square, and erect a building in the rear for his collection.
Honours fell upon him thickly as they had fallen on his brother, alike British and foreign, of which he took little heed, absorbed as he was in the pursuit of knowledge, and its demonstration. His discoveries placed him far ahead of the science of his time, though his courtly brother, earlier in the field and first to leave it, ran him close. Indeed their final quarrel and alienation arose out of a disputed claim to a certain discovery in feminine physiology, brought before the Royal Society, a quarrel which transferred William's museum to the University of Glasgow, and excluded John from his will.
The so-called "Lyceum Medicum" in Leicester Square, became the home of the "Society for the Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge," and the "Philosophical Transactions" of the Society testify to the genius and untiring activity of its promoter. How he found time for his many written essays and discourses on topics wide apart as "Gunshot-wounds" and "Teeth" is a marvel. No wonder the frail human machine wore out so early. He had worked when he should have rested, worked regardless of premonitions and attacks John Hunter must have well understood, and died at last at sixty-two, a victim of one of those fits of passion no man with a diseased heart can indulge in safely.