Modern day relevance of William Hunter's approach to teaching "the organ of hearing"

Abstract

William Hunter, a pioneering teacher of Anatomy in the the eighteenth century, championed the use of dissected specimens as aids in the teaching of anatomy. Although Hunter promoted the Paris method of learning Anatomy, by student dissection, he also used prosected material as an adjunct to his lectures. We are fortunate that Hunter bequeathed his extensive collection of over 3,000 museum specimens to the University of Glasgow, many of which are housed in the Laboratory of Human Anatomy in the Thomson Building. Regions such as the temporal bone are frequently difficult for students, and indeed postgraduate trainees in ear nose and throat surgery, to visualize and understand. Hunter overcame this difficulty by producing elegant specimens highlighting the three-dimensional complexity of the area. The current vignette stresses the importance of Hunter in his contemporary setting, but also demonstrates the potential of his approach for current and future teaching programmes in this age of the Internet. Clin. Anat. 26:551-555, 2013. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Copyright © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.