In this same great wonder-century lived also John Hunter, the greatest of England's medical students, the most famous surgeon of his day and the most indefatigable collector in natural history and natural science that ever lived. He was born in 1728 and died in 1783. He was led to study medicine by the fame of his illustrious brother William, and began his studies by acting as prosector for him. He soon became a pupil of Cheselden, perhaps the most famous English surgeon of his generation. Hunter developed very early those extraordinary powers of observation and that originality in investigation which later made him so famous. Early in his medical career he came for a time under the influence of Percival Pott. This was at a time when surgery had emerged from barbarism and when the French Academy of Surgery had erected it into the dignity of a science. He entered St. George's Hospital in 1754 as a surgeon's pupil. Later he became a partner with his brother in the latter's private school of anatomy, but John, being a poor lecturer, was distinguished by his services in the dissecting-room rather than in the amphitheater. The customs of his time and the jealousies of the various medical factions then existing in London led to numerous acrimonious disputes, in the literary part of which William Hunter, who was much the more cultured student, took the lead, while John, who lacked in scholastic ability and had much less education, was relied on to supply the anatomical data. John was painfully aware of his deficiencies in literary culture and is said once to have replied to the disparaging remarks of an opponent: "He accuses me of not understanding the dead languages, but I could tell him that on the dead body which he never knew in any language living or dead." It was in this way that he was led into unseemly encounters with the Munros, of Edinburgh, and with his late teacher, Pott. The same sort of dispute finally separated the two brothers, and they parted company after a very unseemly exhibition of jealousy and fraternal discord. After studying human anatomy for several years, John Hunter became profoundly impressed with the need for much larger knowledge of comparative anatomy, but about this time ill health compelled a temporary change and so he went into the army as a staff surgeon. This was at the time when Europe was engaged in the sanguinary Seven Years' War, and so it happened that Hunter had ample opportunity for studies and observations in military surgery--at the siege of Belleisle and later in the war in the Peninsula. Here he made many of those observations on gunshot wounds which he published at various periods later and which helped to make him famous.