The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow, established in 1807, houses the oldest collection anywhere in Scotland, which has been continuously available to the viewing public, under the same ownership and governing body, until the present day. Bequeathed to the University in 1783by the distinguished physician and anatomist William Hunter, a former student, the Museum was first housed in a handsome classical building, regrettably demolished in 1870 when the University removed to its present location in the city's West End. The Museum was then assigned halls in Sir George Gilbert Scott's neo-Gothic university buildings on Gilmorehill. In subsequent decades parts of the collection were gradually dispersed, in the laudable interests of teaching and to alleviate overcrowding, to the University departments of Zoology, Anatomy and Pathology, the latter based at the city's Royal Infirmary. The Hunterian books and manuscripts migrated to a new University Library in the late 1960s. A purpose-built Hunterian Art Gallery, opened in 1980, now houses William Hunter's paintings and prints together with many later additions.

Any historian of William Hunter and the museum which bears his name has at his disposal a wide range of both primary and secondary sources. In the first instance letters and correspondence in the hand of William (as I shall henceforth call him) are available, many of them held at Glasgow University Library or the Royal College of Surgeons of England, Lincoln's Inn Fields, London.