300 year old pickled arseholes

Have just spent an incredible afternoon in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgery, a free museum on the South Side of Lincoln's Inn Fields. It is almost directly opposite the John Soanes museum, and both house the spoils of two of the most fanatical gentlemen collectors of the 18th century. Whereas Soanes taste ran to pinching or plaster casting endless architectural details of the ancient world, Hunter's habit is arguably more interesting: he pickled.

Hunter was a pickler. He was a preserver. A surgeon at a time when the profession had barely disassociated itself from that of barber, he collected hundreds of specimens, and, in the name of human knowledge, and having cut them up or left them whole, and suspended them in alcohol. The Hunterian museum has glass cases covering two floors, each containing hundreds of parts of animals or people who last breathed air 300 years ago. And that is not to mention the skeletons, skulls, and casts. It is overwhelming. The mad thing is that only a third of his collection remains - two thirds was destroyed by a bomb in 1941 - not difficult, as a lot of it was in highly flammable alcohol. Pictures and photographs of the collection as it was are hard to describe. Huge rooms contain a whole Noah's ark cut up and pickled or wired and suspended, stopped mid stride or in submerged alcoholic slumber, as it were, waiting.

To a layman, it is the method which appeals. He would classify the organ of each animal according to function - vision, digestion, circulation, etc, and then classify them according to that. So one corner on the ground floor is devoted to the organs of excretion of many different animals - bears bumhole, crab's cloaca, cat's crapper. A whole array of pickled rectums. A cabinet of teeth. A cabinet of ears. This is the whole of the animal kingdom reimagined as a spare-parts brochure, an Argos catalogue, laid out from simple to complex. And the system is merciless: foetuses also form their own category under 'organs of generation', and so a dozen human foetuses at various stages of development from a few weeks to full-term are suspended, eerily still, in alcohol, on the second floor.

If the system is rational, Hunter needed passion to put it together. Many animal specimens were from Cook's Tour. The human specimens were donated, or (one imagines), appropriated in a very 18th c way by the gentlemanly surgeon from amongst his patients. An Irishman called Byrne at the time made a living from being 7 foot 7 inches tall, and, it being known to him that Hunter coveted his bones, made arrangements to be buried at sea. Whoever it was was paid off and now Byrne's huge frame is indeed in one of Hunter's glass cases - displayed next to the skeleton of a man with a rare condition that caused bones to grow through his muscles and vein pathways, and whose skeleton consists of the usual grisly arrangement enmeshed in a cruel snaking network of improvised bones, leading from nowhere to nowhere, the sadistic invention of his own body for its own punishment.

A gruesome day out, but a fascinating insight into the history of medecine - preferable even to the excellent Wellcome Collection. Just don't go immediately after lunch.