This transformation project, writes the Guardian's Oliver Wainwright, "has reinstated the museum to its original footprint and breathed dazzling new life into this fascinating cabinet of curiosities....Tiny moth eggs and silkworms – along with several human foetuses – are now displayed in little glass jars on shelves in the Hunterian Museum, one of London’s most extraordinary attractions."

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"It is not a place for the squeamish. More than 2,000 jars of pickled body parts – from brains and bladders to tumours and toes – now line either side of a long, atmospherically lit gallery, from which other rooms break off to tell the life story of the eccentric scientist."

"While the previous version of the museum foregrounded the spotlit body parts over the wider stories, what comes across in the new layout – elegantly executed by exhibition designers Casson Mann – is the sheer breadth of subjects consumed by Hunter’s self-professed “grand curiosity”. He worked on more than 500 different species of animals and made numerous dissections of plants, studying everything from the circulation of insects, to the air sacs of birds..."

"Where it knows the backstories, the museum has been careful to include them and there is no shying away from the brutal mores of the times."

"The museum isn’t only dedicated to the colourful life of Hunter and his exploits on the dissection table. A series of later rooms track the evolution of surgery after his death...A time-lapse film of a 90-minute orthopaedic operation condensed to 10 minutes reveals the nimble ballet that surgical staff perform daily, while another screen tells the stories of patients and their surgeons."

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