ABSTRACT
The famed eighteenth-century surgeon and anatomist John Hunter, a central figure in the history of surgery and anatomy, built his considerable surgical proficiency on an unrivalled knowledge of human anatomy. ‘When Hunter cut, probed, sliced and sawed, he knew better than anyone else the exact whereabouts, the precise functions and the particular habits of every organ, muscle, blood vessel and tissue, healthy or diseased, that he was likely to encounter’. The endoderm tube is divided into three distinct areas: the foregut, the midgut and the hindgut. The caecum, appendix, ascending colon and the proximal two-thirds of the transverse colon are midgut derivatives. As the midgut increases in length during development, it forms a loop that is attached to the vitelline duct. The hindgut gives rise to the distal-most third of the transverse colon, the descending colon, sigmoid colon, rectum and the upper half of the anal canal.
