Case not proven

Abstract

Don Shelton's article1 raises some interesting questions about the sources of William Hunter's and William Smellie's subjects for their obstetric atlases but it does not add up to a convincing case that they received murdered bodies. I cannot comment on Smellie's atlas, but it is not true that most of the subjects in Hunter's book were women in the final month of pregnancy. Hunter's atlas contains 34 plates of which the first 10 relate to just one woman, who died at full-term. Hunter refers in the text to two more women who died in or near their last month, amounting to a total of three women at full-term. But the point of the atlas was to depict pregnancy at all stages, so the book shows fetuses at various stages of development, working backwards from full-term. So there were three full-term, or almost full-term women, all obtained in the years 1750–1751. Certainly it is unusual for full-term women to die. And Hunter was evasive about the source of his pregnant subjects, although he describes the second as having died ‘of a flooding in the last month of pregnancy’. If the body-snatchers dug up graves randomly, it would be highly unlikely they would find three full-term women in this space of time. But the bodysnatchers did not work randomly. Even in the mid-18th century, they had connections with gravediggers and sextons – in fact some of them were gravediggers and sextons – who knew who had died and where they were buried so they could arrange resurrections to order. When pregnant women died in hospital, those deaths were obviously known to doctors there who could simply order an exhumation (as Astley Cooper later described). Furthermore, when John Hunter mentioned the ‘leading steps’ to procuring a body being secret, he was probably referring to bodysnatching rather than murder. Surgeons were certainly discreet about this practice – with good reason. John's own house was mobbed when human remains were discovered being taken away and at least one 18th-century surgeon was prosecuted for receiving dead bodies. So while it is not impossible that the women in Hunter's and Smellie's atlases were murdered (it is not correct to describe them as being ‘burked’ since that term did not come into use until after the Burke and Hare murders in 1827) it is not possible to make out a case based on laws of probability.