William Hunter CB FRSE (1 June 1861 – 13 January 1937)[1] was a British surgeon known primarily for his theories on oral sepsis, one of the inspirations for the Henry Cotton theory of focal sepsis which led to the increased number of tooth extractions and tonsillectomies in the 1910s and 20s (under the presumption that hidden sepsis could lead to a wider health decline in individuals).

During the First World War he initially served as a colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps then was created president of the advisory committee on health to the East Mediterranean and Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force and consultant to the Eastern Command.

[4] Edinburgh University awarded him an honorary doctorate (LLD) in 1927 along with Sir Berkeley Moynihan during a meeting of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association, at which Hunter gave a lengthy address comparing the work of Joseph Lister who had been born 100 years previously, and the work of the American doctor Henry Cotton, praising the latter as a pioneer of surgical interventions in mental disorder, an idea that Hunter had speculated on but with which Cotton had followed through experimentally.

These surgical interventions, including resections of the colon, and the removal of the teeth, tonsils, and occasionally stomach, were widely discredited during the 1930s when it was discovered that permanent recovery did not typically occur after such interventions, and the mortality of such colon surgeries was unacceptably high.

He headed the British Military Sanitary Committee to Serbia in 1915 tasked with stopping the 1915 typhus and relapsing fevers there.