The following extract from Ottley[13] gives an interesting view of Hunter’s after-dinner habits. “After dinner he was accustomed to sleep for about an hour, and his evenings were spent either in preparing or delivering lectures, in dictating to an amanuensis the records of particular cases, of which he kept a regular entry, or in a similar manner committing to paper the substance of any work on which he chanced to be engaged. When employed in the latter way, Mr. Bell and he used to retire to the study, the former carrying with him from the museum such preparations as related to the subject on which Hunter was engaged: these were placed on the table before him, and at the other end sat Mr. Bell, writing from Hunter’s dictation. The manuscript was then looked over, and the grammatical blunders, for Bell was an uneducated man, corrected by Hunter. At twelve the family went to bed, and the butler, before retiring to rest, used to bring in a fresh Argand lamp, by the light of which Hunter continued his labours until one or two in the morning, or even later in winter. Thus he left only about four hours for sleep, which, with the hour after dinner, was all the time that he devoted to the refreshment of his body. He had no home amusements for the relaxation of his mind, and the only indulgence of this kind he enjoyed consisted in an evening’s ramble amongst the various denizens of earth and air which he had congregated at Earl’s Court.” In January 1776 Mr. Hunter attained a court position, being appointed surgeon-extraordinary to the king. In the same year he became interested in the efforts of the Humane Society, and at its request drew up a paper for the Royal Society on the recovery of the apparently-drowned. Herein he makes a just distinction between absolute death and suspended animation, illustrates different modes of dying, and describes many signs of life and death. This year was also the first in which he delivered the Croonian lecture to the Royal Society, on muscular motion, a subject which he continued in successive years till 1782 (omitting 1777); but the lectures were never published, being, he said, too incomplete.