Background
Clift was born on February 14, 1775, in Burcombe, England, the youngest child of Robert Clift, a miller, who died in 1784, leaving his wife (Joanna Coutts, a carpenter’s daughter) and seven children in poverty.
conservator illustrator scientist
Clift was born on February 14, 1775, in Burcombe, England, the youngest child of Robert Clift, a miller, who died in 1784, leaving his wife (Joanna Coutts, a carpenter’s daughter) and seven children in poverty.
William showed marked artistic promise and manual skill. Through local patronage he was apprenticed to the great London surgeon and biologist John Hunter, working as dissection assistant and recorder in lieu of fee, but Hunter’s sudden death in 1793 deprived him of surgical training.
Clift arrived in London on 14 February 1792 and was taken on as an unpaid apprentice to John Hunter "to write and make drawings, to dissect and take part in the charge of the museum" which his master had established at the back of his house in Leicester Square. Hunter’s will directed that his scientific collections be offered for sale to the government as a unit. During negotiations (1793-1799) his executors, Matthew Baillie and Everard Home, retained Clift as curator of the collections. He maintained and developed the Hunterian Museum for fifty years and perpetuated Hunter’s method of medical education through research in comparative anatomy.
The government bought the collections and placed them in trust with the Royal College of Surgeons in London; Clift moved them from Hunter’s former home in 1806, settled at the college, and became administrator of the Hunterian Museum, as the collections were known. He equipped a new museum in 1813 (rebuilt in 1834-1837); formed a scientific library; acquired specimens by gift and purchase; dissected, mounted, and described them; provided anatomical and pathological material for the college’s lecturers; and explained the museum to visitors.
Clift had educated himself by studying Hunter’s preparations and manuscript records, of which he made calligraphic copies, and was employed by Baillie and Home to illustrate their scientific writings. Home used Hunter’s manuscripts for his own voluminous contributions to the Philosophical Transactions and destroyed most of the originals in 1823, greatly to the disadvantage of Clift’s descriptive cataloguing of the museum. Hunter’s purpose in forming the museum had been to display the processes of fife through examples drawn from the whole animal kingdom, both extant and fossil, arranged according to the functional systems of the body - skeletal, muscular, nervous, digestive, and reproductive - in both normal and pathologic conditions. Clift’s achievement was the organization of this educative display, applying by his own manual skill the best technical methods of the day and adding to Hunter’s collection in order to embrace advancing knowledge, without overloading it or altering Hunter’s scheme. Under Clift’s charge, the museum attracted worldwide interest and redirected the method and purpose of museum display.
Clift became an acknowledged authority in comparative anatomy, especially in the identification of fossil bones, and helped to formulate the scientific basis of paleontology. He was active in the anatomical, geological, and zoological societies, and especially in the Animal Chemistry Society (1809-1825). He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1823 and served on its council in 1833-1834. Clift’s lifework and memorial was the Hunterian Museum. He published a few papers, mainly descriptive, but left a mass of unpublished records of his curatorship. The unsigned catalogs of the museum, printed between 1830 and 1840, were planned and partly written by him but were completed by Richard Owen. Clift’s help was acknowledged by many prominent scientists - including Banks, Brodie, Cuvier, Davy, Lyell, and Man tell - in addition to those whose writings he illustrated with accomplished draftsmanship.
Clift was not self-seeking, but extremely generous of his time and knowledge. Accustomed from his youth to working for others, he never displayed his tenacity and independence until he denounced Home’s destruction of Hunter’s manuscripts before the Parliamentary Committee on Medical Education in 1834 and showed that Home had hoped to destroy evidence of his plagiarism.
Physical Characteristics: A small man, rather broad of face, Clift bore a fortuitous resemblance to Hunter.
Clift’s artistic abilities were notable. Hunter taught him to dissect and mount specimens and provided him with professional lessons in drawing and calligraphy; he also became a competent watercolorist.
Clift was a keen amateur musician, playing several string and wind instruments.
In 1801 Clift married Caroline Pope; their son William Home Clift, who died at twenty-nine, was trained to succeed him. Their daughter Caroline married his assistant and successor Richard Owen, who became the greatest British comparative anatomist of the century.
