So wrote William Hunter, surgeon turned physician, in an introductory lecture for his London anatomy class in the early 1780s. Hunter made a nicely prescient guess about the direction of progress in medicine. Read with the benefit of hindsight, his comment evokes the juncture of three paths into the “direct road” to medical modernity. First, Hunter pointed to an empirical methodology for “improvements in physic” that detached the investigation of disease from patients' experiences of illness and from direct concern for treating it. A newly conceptualized medicine started at death, when the bedside-practitioner gave up and the scientist-practitioner took over – and these were the same person. Second, Hunter placed his man in a hospital where he had equal power “to attend the sick” and to “dissect the dead.” Casting the hospital as an institution where practitioners deployed new methods to produce new knowledge transformed an expression of charitable care and social concern into a foundation for professional medical authority.