His father was George Hunter, a deputy engineer in the General Post Office.
He entered The London Hospital in 1915 but left in World War I to become a surgeon probationer RNVR in HMS Faulkner in the Dover Patrol.
Hunter became curator to the Medical School Museum in 1933, and during his 30 years in office collected specimens representing all of morbid anatomy.
In 1925 he married Mathilda Bugnion, a graduate from Somerville College, Oxford and daughter of a Lutheran Pastor from Lausanne, Switzerland.
In 1935 he gave a series of lectures to the Derby Medical Society on occupational diseases.