William Smellie and William Hunter accused of murder …

Abstract

I fully endorse the quick responses of Wendy Moore and Tina Matthews to Don Shelton’s paper, ‘The Emperor’s new clothes’.1 Given some of the complicated midwifery cases illustrated, it would have been as difficult to seek out some of the examples of rare midwifery cases in the living and have them murdered ‘to order’ as to open up graves at random and find such cases. William Smellie actually suggests, in the preface to A sett of anatomical tables, that the subjects had been ‘prepared on purpose’. His sometime pupil Peter Camper records in his diary of 17612 that Dr Smellie’s figures ‘were not all from real life… The children are placed in pelves of women, the children themselves looked natural, but the other parts were copied from other preparations…’ Camper claimed he had on several occasions used forceps to deliver a fetal head from a corpse and subsequently ‘made careful drawings and profiles’ before the mother’s body was further dissected. It becomes apparent in Hunter’s work that the 34 plates were taken from 12 different subjects.3 Hunter was also adept at preserving specimens with wax and used plaster casts, as was the practice in certain cities of Europe. This economy in the use of cadavers to produce a series of illustrations was no doubt complemented by the skills of the artists and engravers involved, who may upon occasion have resorted to some degree of ‘artistic licence’. Rymsdyk, the main artist involved in the production of both the birth atlases also had lots of opportunity to become familiar with the subject material; not only did he draw for Smellie and Hunter but also for Nicholas Jenty,4 who incidentally reports one of his two pregnant subjects died near to term of a haemorrhage resulting from a diseased aorta and a lacerated pulmonary artery. Historians aspire to contribute to a better understanding of the past and have ‘obligations to their sources, their readers, the past and the public at large’.5 This is exemplified when those standing accused or maligned are no longer able to speak up for themselves, and become vulnerable to sensationalistic journalism.6