William Smellie Research Articles

Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle

Reviewed by: Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle Shannon K. Withycombe (bio) Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America nora doyle University of North Carolina Press, 2018 286 pp. At some point in my courses in history of women and history of reproduction I like to show students images of pregnancy from eighteenth-century medical anatomy texts. I ask my students to gaze at images from William Hunter or William Smellie, to think about how these illustrations of [End Page 276] disembodied pelvises, chopped-off limbs, and abdomens splayed open affected how doctors and others approached reproducing women. If a young man learned about childbirth from a dismembered torso, detached from a woman’s mind and voice, how could this shape his actions in the midst of a birthing scene? How could these illustrations influence understandings of women’s bodies or their reproductive activities, and limit women’s roles in determining medical care or their ability to be heard? Nora Doyle answers these questions and many more with her study of the maternal body in early America. Uncovering descriptions, images, and ideals of the maternal body in print culture between 1750 and 1850, Doyle examines popular narratives about women birthing and nursing children, but more compellingly compares these narratives to women’s personal writings about their reproducing bodies. Juggling this multiplicity of sources, Doyle is able to present an original, timely, and captivating history. While the histories of reproduction and motherhood are rich genres, historians have rarely placed the body so squarely in the center of a study. Bodies often show up on the margins, but usually remain background or context for learned medicine, female activism, and governmental policy. Doyle considers both bodies in their unruly corporeality—leaking breasts, aching backs, tearing flesh—and their culturally mediated discursive and visual representations; perhaps most importantly, she delves into how these aspects of the maternal body are indelibly intertwined. Doyle shows not only that bodies matter but also that we cannot understand the institution of motherhood without a deep analysis of understandings of the bodies involved. Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, two cultural transformations severely shaped the maternal body in American print culture. Following a similar movement in Europe, American medical men began to seek out the business of birthing women. These men instantly faced the social task of overturning the notion that entering a birthing room, sitting with a laboring woman, and examining how her labor was progressing (which usually included raising her skirts and looking directly at her vagina) was not something that a respectable man should be doing. As Doyle demonstrates, aspiring male-midwives, seeking to desexualize the experience, shifted the focus during birth from the woman to the uterus. Medical texts and advice manuals depicted the womb as an active agent in charge of expelling the child, and in illustrations as physically separated [End Page 277] from a woman with a voice, a will, or even complete legs. As male practitioners divided and dismembered the female body, women were essentially erased from the event; their maternal bodies became invisible and inactive. At the same time, Enlightenment projects crafted idealized womanhood as a mother focused on the emotional, moral, and spiritual nature of producing and raising children. Prescriptive literature, fiction and poetry, and images appearing in women’s magazines depicted an orderly, gentle, calm maternal body. Doyle highlights the presentation of breastfeeding in these narratives, the one physical activity that could be reconstructed as a moral, orderly pursuit. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers could portray breastfeeding as a pleasurable emotional activity, unlike childbirth. The typified sentimental mother only received pleasure from her mothering; it was dangerous to acknowledge the pain, distress, and the supreme physicality of motherhood. To fulfill her goal of restoring the body “to its rightful place in the history of motherhood,” Doyle cannot rely only on the print culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (210). She also analyzes the impact of these genres by investigating the centrality of the body within women’s personal writings about pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing. Doyle discovers a range of women’s reflections on and reactions to their physical...

William Hunter (1718-1783): his legacy three hundred years from his birthday

The aim of this paper is to evaluate some aspects of the life of William Hunter (1718-1783), and to argue that he deserves a better place in history as he was one of the most outstanding figures in British medicine of the 18th century. A Scotsman, Presbyterian, from a family without means or connections, he underwent a classic education at the University of Glasgow, completed with apprenticeships with William Cullen and Alexander Monro first in Scotland, and then in London, with William Smellie, James Douglas and James Wilkie, in anatomy, obstetrics and surgery, respectively. Despite initial disadvantages, he was highly successful as an anatomist, educator, surgeon, man-midwife, artist, gentleman and collector. He moved and had influences in the highest medical, cultural and social circles of his time, was named Physician Extraordinary to Queen Charlotte, and was a member of many scientific, medical and cultural societies in Great Britain and in France, such as the Royal Society, the Royal College of Physicians and the Societé Royale de Médicine of Paris. His museum was notable in its magnitude and its diversity, including anatomical preparations, coins, shells, plants, birds, insects, fossils, and minerals. He donated his great museum to the University of Glasgow. His figure has been relegated mainly due to the absence of heirs, individuals or institutional, that could have cared for, maintained, and increased his legacy as happened with his brother John.

Before Louise: the history of infertility.

With gender equality and the ‘modern family’, the pace for advances in artificial reproductive technology is fast-moving. Louise Brown was the world's first ‘test tube baby’, born in 1978 (Steptoe & Edwards. Lancet 1978;2:366) (Figure 1). However, infertility and reproductive medicine have featured heavily in ancient mythology of many cultures, reflecting their long-standing value in human society. The Hippocratic Corpus from the 5th and 4th centuries BCE include three chapters on gynaecology and infertility, where infertility had become a medicalised concept and treatment options were proposed. Coxe's translation lists five causes of infertility: ‘the os uteri wrongly situated and firmly closed; the lubricity of the uterus preventing the retention of the seed; ulceration of the body of the uterus consequent to other diseases; retention of the menses; and too great laxity of the orifice of the uterus, precluding the retention of the seed’. Remedies for these afflictions included instrumentation of the stenosed cervical os, a multitude of pessaries containing herbal remedies, fumigation techniques, and specific instructions regarding the timing and method of intercourse (Coxe. The Writings of Hippocrates and Galen, Lindsay & Blakiston, Philadelphia, 306–7). There is also mention of ‘somatic’ or systemic causes, including what we now know as obesity (Flemming. Bull Hist Med 2013;87:565–90). The medicalisation of infertility improved understanding of anatomy and the advent of microscopy drove significant advancements during the 17th century. In 1672, Regnier de Graaf described the ovarian follicles now named after him, at the time believed to be the embryo that migrated to the uterus (Ankum et al. Hum Reprod Update 1996;2:365–9). Spermatozoa was first described in 1677 by microbiologist Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek, who hesitantly inspected his own semen. He wrote to the Royal Society of London stating, ‘If your Lordship should consider that these observations may disgust or scandalise the learned, I earnestly beg your Lordship to regard them as private and to publish or destroy them, as your Lordship sees fit’ (Philos Trans R Soc 1678;12:1040–3). William Smellie wrote on the concept of fertilisation in 1752, outlining the process of ovulation, transit of the ovum through the fallopian tube, and describing semen as ‘abounding with animalcula, that swim about in it like so many tadpoles’ (Smellie. A treatise on the theory and practice of midwifery, Balliere Tindall, London, 1974 reprint; 113–4). Spallanzani pioneered artificial insemination in 1784, achieving pregnancy in dogs, while Dr John Hunter performed the first successful artificial insemination in a human in 1790 for a man with hypospadias (Guttmacher. Ann NY Acad Sci 1962;97:623–31). Contrast this gradual development in reproductive medicine since Hippocrates with the 40 years since Louise Brown's birthday in 1978. The advances in reproductive technology – sperm and egg donors, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, frozen intravenous fertilisation cycles, surrogacy, gamete intrafallopian transfer and preimplantation genetic diagnosis – are remarkable. Improved take-home-baby rates, fewer multiple pregnancies, lower rates of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, and time-lapse embryology have followed. This rate of advancement likely reflects our societal drive to develop these technologies, with corresponding improvement in outcomes as described in this issue. The next 40 years are likely to be exciting. None declared. Completed disclosure of interests form available to view online as supporting information. Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.

Phantoms in the Classroom: Midwifery Training in Enlightenment Europe

Phantoms in the Classroom: Midwifery Training in Enlightenment Europe

The history of greatest anatomical discoveries

21st century medicine is an empirical and best developing study in each of its fields. Based on the experience and discoveries conducted by researchers throughout its rich history, contemporary medicine relies on pure facts. Hippocrates was the father of human anatomy and medical backgrounds. He described the body fluids, the heart and some other internal organs. One of the most prominent researchers in the field of anatomy was also a Roman physician – Galen. He described the heart anatomy and the cardiovascular system in details. However, the biggest contribution to the heart examination was done by a medical specialist from London – William Harvey. It was him, who discovered the pumping work of the organ, not the sucking one, as it was previously believed. Simultaneously, the examinations on anatomy and physiology of reproductive organs were carried out, which can be found in the Egyptian papyrus from Kahun and the Ebers papyrus. Not only Hippocrates was engaged in the studies, but the greatest ancient obstetrician Soranus of Ephezus, as well. Further anatomical discoveries included the description of the role of oviducts (Fallopian tubes) by Gabrielle Falloppio, the ovarian follicle by Graaf and the bone structure of the pelvis, which was considered to be the most essential during labour (William Smellie, Gustaw Michaelis, Theodor Litzmann).

FATHER OF BRITISH OBSTETRICS

The article highlights historic aspects of medical and research work of the British obstetrician of the XVIII century William Smellie

Feminism, Vegetarianism, and Colonial Resistance in Eighteenth-Century British Novels

Contrary to accepted belief, a discourse replete with religious, medical, and moral arguments emerged during the eighteenth century. Moreover, anti-meat utterances, whenever they occurred, were often politically charged--shot through with questions regarding the status of women, animals, and Hindoos (Regan 15). Until recently, most histories of vegetarianism paid little attention to the eighteenth century, making only passing reference to it and reserving rigorous explication of the discourse for the mid-nineteenth century and later. A few anthologies, however, went a step further and assembled canonical eighteenth-century statements on the issue but stopped short of treating them as literary phenomena. (1) This belated attention to the proto-vegetarianism of the eighteenth century is not surprising given that the word vegetarian was not coined until 1847, and vegetarianism did not find its institutional expression until 1849 with the founding of Great Britain's Vegetarian Society. (2) Figuring prominently into this proto-vegetarian discourse are British perceptions of India. In eighteenth-century writings on India, the vegetarianism of the Hindus was at first considered a curiosity and later as evidence of racial inferiority. The English had associated their own hearty consumption of beef with military superiority. (3) But now (as we shall see in the writings of Dow, Orme, Falconer, and others) they were associating beef-eating with superiority over not just military rivals but colonial subjects like the East Indians, who were, according to William Smellie's 1791 Philosophy of Natural History, a meager, sick, and feeble race due to their diet (144). A vegetable diet, it was thought, contributed to weakness, indolence, and military ineptitude and, consequently, races like the East Indians were destined for subordination. But such politicized colonial discourse soon gave rise to its obverse. Female novelists like Phebe Gibbes in Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) and Eliza Hamilton in Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) opposed the denigration of the other by contributing to an incipient feminist-vegetarian discourse (a discourse more explicit in the essays of contemporaries like Catharine Macaulay and Mary Hays). Both created a voice of female-centered authority in the literature of romantic orientalism, a voice of authority from which to critique the imperial project. They inevitably noticed an important fact about India that makes it unique among the world's cultures: vegetarianism was a normative feature of the culture. Critics have been divided over whether these novels support or criticize the imperialist project and over the extent to which they critique structures of class, race, and gender in Great Britain. One thing is certain--both defend the colonial administration of Warren Hastings and the East India Company. Mona Narain finds in Hamilton's novel such strong support for a paternalistic vision of a benevolent English empire that any critique of patriarchy is compromised (598). Claire Grogan, on the other hand, asserts that Hamilton's critique of patriarchy is alive and well, as evidenced by her creation of an alternative female discourse of the East--one that contributes to and contests the field of Orientalism (29). Gibbes, too, explores a new discursive space in her creation of Sophia Goldbourne, a voice of moral authority on the East who speaks the language of sensibility. In what follows, I first establish how the imperial discourse surrounding vegetarianism reflects a gendered language of emasculation. Next, I examine Hamilton's and Gibbe's novels as critical responses. Such responses, when read through a feminist viewpoint, can be understood as contributing to the emergence of a modern, politically self-conscious discourse. These novels, through their encounter with the other, express sensitivity to the parallel oppression of women and animals in a patriarchal culture. …

Knowledge and the Systematic Reader: The Past and Present of Encyclopedic Learning

Though digital media have unquestionably affected the features and functions of modern encyclopedias, such works also continue to be shaped by factors thoroughly conventional by the end of the historical Enlightenment. As William Smellie, editor of the first Encyclopædia Britannica (1768-71) wrote, “utility ought to be the principal intention of every publication. Wherever this intention does not plainly appear, neither the books nor their authors have the smallest claim to the approbation of mankind.” The “instructional designers” and “user-experience specialists” of the online Britannica are the inheritors of all those authors and editors who before and after Smellie’s time devised different plans and methods intended to maximize the utility of their works. The definition of utility and with it the nature of encyclopedic knowledge continues to change both because of and despite technological difference; if digitization has in some ways advanced the ideals of Enlightenment encyclopedias, then it has in other ways allowed for the re-inscription of certain flaws and limitations that encyclopedias like the Britannica were specifically designed to overcome. By examining not only what one might read in the encyclopedia but also the ways in which one might read it, this article demonstrates the extent to which the notion of encyclopedic utility depends on historical context.

William Smellie and the Macabre Side of Obstetrical Science

William Smellie, the pioneering obstetrician and anatomist, was born in Lanark, Scotland, in 1697. He practised medicine from the age of 23, but only received a medical degree in 1745 from the University of Glasgow. After moving to London, Smellie became a renowned teacher of midwifery; William and John Hunter were among his students. His most famous text, A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgment, of the practice of midwifery, was published in 1749. The copper plates for this tome were meticulously engraved by Charles Grignion, after drawings made in red chalk by Jan van Rymsdyk. Little is known about van Rymsdyk, but over the 20 years following the publication of Smellie’s text, his work was to evolve to even grander levels of realism. The texts of both Smellie and Hunter were monumental, though they may have been bought at a terrible price. The legitimate supply of recently dead, yet heavily pregnant women was arguably inadequate to meet the needs of these and other competing anatomists.1,2 Consequently, they may have either commissioned murders or turned a blind eye to the sources of their cadavers. Others argue that this was not the case: several of Smellie’s plates were based on the same dissections, reducing the number of cadavers needed; and others were legitimized by specific case histories explaining their origins.3 However, it remains possible that some of these women and babies died from criminal rather than natural causes.

The continuing influence of William Smellie (1697–1763) in Japan during the early Meiji Period (1868–1880s)

From the second half of the 18th century, Japanese obstetricians incorporated William Smellie's Anatomical Tables in their publications. The translation and explanation of an obstetrical print from 1880 indicates that Smellie's influence continued during the early Meiji period, a transition period characterized by a combination of western knowledge and traditional medical thoughts from the Edo period (1603-1868).

Natural History and Narrative Sympathy: The Children’s Animal Stories of Edward Augustus Kendall (1775/6?–1842)

Edward Augustus Kendall (1775/6?–1842), a late eighteenth-century writer of children’s animal stories, deserves recognition for his sustained attempt to offer an empathetic rendition of imagined animal experience in fiction. His early fiction, including the dog story Keeper’s Travels (1798) and several tales of bird life, contributed to the development of more sympathetic attitudes to non-human animals in the late eighteenth century. Two factors influenced the development of Kendall’s innovative treatment of animal characters. First, the natural history of Buffon and his English translators and followers, in particular William Smellie, informed Kendall’s detailed attention to animal behaviour and to questions of animal mind and sentience. Second, the contemporary development of narrative techniques designed, on the basis of the imaginative sympathy theorized by Adam Smith, to encourage readers to identify with protagonists’ feelings, prompted Kendall to extend such methods to the representation of animal characters. He helped shift animal representation away from fable and satire towards naturalism and empathy. His use of third-person narrative proved most fruitful in this regard, and anticipated later developments in the imaginative apprehension of non-human experience.

Man-midwifery history: 1730–1930

This paper seeks to determine whether the man-midwives William Smellie and William Hunter deserve continuing approbation as ‘Founding Fathers’ of the obstetrics profession. Scrutiny of their careers reveals their involvement in murders for dissection. In addition, the man-midwifery initiative of delivery in lying-in hospitals resulted in around 1 million more deaths in Britain and Ireland between 1730 and 1930, than would have occurred had home-births remained as the norm. While some may still credit Smellie and Hunter with obstetric discoveries, their knowledge was obtained by murder-for-dissection. That indictment, together with the lying-in hospital legacy, far outweighs their discoveries. The paper invites further constructive discussion and debate, but concludes the accolade of Founding Fathers is undeserved. Any continuing endorsement of Smellie and Hunter effectively demeans the high ethical standards and reputation of current obstetric professionals.

Umbilical cord accidents

Umbilical cord accidents

The Hunterian Museum (Glasgow)

The Hunterian museum is open again. Constructed on the basis of William Hunter’s bequest and opened in 1807, it moved to its present site, the Gilbert Scott Building at the University of Glasgow, in 1870. After nearly two years of roof repairs the museum re-opened in September 2011. William Hunter (1718–1783) was an obstetrician, anatomist, teacher, scientific researcher and collector. Above all else, he was a self-made man who accumulated knowledge, wealth, artefacts and standing. He was born in East Kilbride, just south of Glasgow, the seventh of ten children. He attended the University of Glasgow (1731–1736) and then became apprentice to William Cullen (1710–1790) in Hamilton. He moved to London in 1740 to pursue further surgical training, attaching himself successively to two notable Scottish expatriate man-midwives: William Smellie (1697–1763) and James Douglas (1675–1742). By dint of consistent and unflagging endeavour he became the best anatomical lecturer and built a large and famous obstetric practice. He made notable scientific advances and became a Fellow of the Royal Society and Anatomy Professor at the Royal Academy. He accumulated great wealth, which he converted into a collection of books, paintings, medals, coins and anatomical/pathological specimens (Figures 1 and 2). This collection forms the basis of the museum. In Ellis’s A History of Surgery, it is William’s younger brother John who is attributed the major part in the development of surgery, though John’s academic debt to his older brother is acknowledged. Ten years apart (in birth and in death), the brothers were quite different characters. William was small, earnest, elegant, cultured, eloquent and always hard-working (Stephen Paget summarized: ‘He never married; he had no country house; he looks, in his portraits, a fastidious, fine gentleman; but he worked till he dropped and he lectured when he was dying’). By contrast, John was ungainly, broad-shouldered, strong and noted for profanity. The transformation of John from difficult wayward child to genius, anatomist and surgeon has been attributed to his older brothers James and (more particularly) William. William had arranged for his brother’s entrance to Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford – but John left after two months, proclaiming, in response to the tutors’ efforts to school him in Latin and Greek, ‘These schemes I cracked like so many vermin!’ John became an admirable practical anatomist and dissector for his brother, and for many years they were friendly and mutually supportive. However, the relationship between the two brothers deteriorated. It is unclear whether this was due to arguments over priority, affiliation, John’s marriage or jealousy over specimens or appointments (the appointment of John to the Royal Society antedated that of William). By 1780 their estrangement was complete, with bitter contestation at the Royal Society over precedence for the discovery of the nature of maternal circulation through the placenta. In the museum today under the banner of ‘The Enlightenment’ – the Age of Reason – is a quotation by Voltaire: ‘We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation’. Prominent figures in the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment include Adam Smith (1723–1787), Professor of Moral Philosophy (1752–1763), economist and author of the Wealth of Nations; Thomas Reid (1710–1796), Professor of Moral Philosophy (1763– 1796); William Cullen (1710–1790), Professor of Medicine (1751–1756); Joseph Black (1728–1799),

Parálisis braquial obstétrica, una revisión histórica

Lesions of the peripheral nerves have been known since ancient times, but there are few references to the treatments that were used in the past. AIM. To analyse obstetric brachial palsy and its treatments throughout history. There are a number of different references to the peripheral nerves and their lesions, although little is known about the treatments that were applied in the past. William Smellie first reported obstetric brachial palsy in 1764 and the term was coined by Duchenne de Boulogne in 1872. In 1877, Erb analysed four cases of obstetric brachial palsy and conducted studies on the excitation of the brachial plexus with electric currents. In 1885, Klumpke described palsy of the lower roots of the brachial plexus. In the late 19th century pathophysiology studies were carried out and at the beginning of the 20th century the first surgical interventions were performed. Today, microsurgery techniques, protocols on how to proceed, and rehabilitation treatment of this lesion are all available and offer good outcomes. Since the first clinical description of obstetric brachial palsy by Smellie and the reports of the different types of brachial palsy by Duchenne, Erb and Klumpke, many pathophysiological studies have been conducted. Notable developments have been made in conservative and surgical treatments, with very favourable recoveries being observed in children with obstetric brachial palsy.

History without Historians? Medical History and the Internet

Recent claims that the eighteenth-century men-midwives William Smellie and William Hunter had women murdered to order, to provide the illustrations for their impressive atlases of obstetrics, raise fresh questions about how medical history is generated, presented and evaluated in the media and, in particular, on the internet. This paper traces the generation and subsequent reception of what, for some, has now become a ‘historical fact’, in order to illustrate how attempts by medical historians to engage with policy and with the public exist alongside a shift towards the deprofessionalisation of history.

Historicizing Literary Cognitivism

Historicizing Literary Cognitivism Suzanne Keen Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Pp. xv, 179. $35.00. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Pp. xiv, 273. $60.00. New books by Alan Richardson and Blakey Vermeule represent the continuing historicizing project of recent works in literary cognitivism published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. As Lisa Zunshine writes in her Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Johns Hopkins, 2010), "investigating the role of universally shared features of human cognition in historically specific forms of cultural production" (2) extends the aims of Raymond Williams in seeing literary art as continuous with everyday life and social institutions, while protecting cognitivists from the charges of ahistorical universalizing. Anxious to correct the impression that cognitive science applied to literature demotes texts to mere records of the human mind/brain in ordinary action, Zunshine asserts that contextual cognitivists aim "not merely to use such artifacts to illustrate a particular scientific hypothesis about one particular feature of human cognition" (3). Instead, cognitivists restore the missing "evolved human brain" to a more integrated matrix of culture, author, reader, and text (8) in discussions of techniques, representations, and influence. Alan Richardson, whose prior work British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (2001) established the impact of late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century discoveries about nerves and brains on the imagery of Romantic writers, stakes the claim of "neural historicism": "The question now is not why should students of literature engage with work in the mind and brain sciences but how?" (Neural Sublime, ix). Richardson and Vermeule demonstrate several different modes of how that engagement might be carried out, intersecting with traditional sources and influences studies and with narrative theory, among other modes relevant to students and teachers of eighteenth-century literature. [End Page 535] The books engage with eighteenth-century texts to different degrees. Blakey Vermeule begins disarmingly with an account of her students' resistance to regarding J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) as a response to Richardson's Clarissa (ix) (a position her tenth chapter brilliantly defends); indeed, her range of reference in Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? is extremely broad, extending from Homer to Ian McEwan. Roughly half the book concerns more conventionally recognizable eighteenth-century fictions. Chapter 5, "The Fantasy of Exposure and Narrative Development in Eighteenth-Century Britain," treats Caleb Williams and Pamela, with glancing references to Pope's poetry. Chapter 6, "God Novels," explores what Vermeule names the "high mind-reading tradition" (129) by examining narrative techniques in Tom Jones and Clarissa. Chapter 7, "Gossip and Literary Narratives," briefly considers Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957), Patricia Meyer Spacks's Gossip (1985), Catherine Gallagher's Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (1994), and William Warner's Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (1998). Chapter 8, "What's the Matter with Miss Bates?," discusses Jane Austen's fiction, while chapter 9, "Mind Blindness," discusses Swift and Hogarth in a broader consideration of eighteenth-century satire. Chapter 10 returns to Clarissa by way of its reflections on Coetzee. The eighteenth century and especially the eighteenth-century novel serve as home base for Vermeule's discursive orbits. Alan Richardson's briefer book also demonstrates disparate interests, in the sublime, the status of mental images, apostrophe, Theory of Mind, sibling incest, and the speech known as motherese (or parentese), but its center of gravity is Romanticism. As Richardson writes, each chapter seeks to "reorient an unresolved issue within Romantic studies by recourse to cognitive theory, to indicate new possibilities for cognitive literary criticism, and to introduce readers to a given area in cognitive, neuroscientific, or evolutionary thought" (xii). Richardson's literary historical commitments keep the period at the center of discussions of Percy Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Keats, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen. Burke on the sublime, Bentham on incest avoidance, Herder, Rousseau, and William Smellie on theories of language supply the sources and influences at the heart of Richardson's contextualizing "neural...

Scotland's "wooden operator" William Smellie (1697-1763) and his counterpart in France André Levret (1703-1780): two great obstetricians and anatomists.

During the eighteenth century two great physicians, William Smellie and André Levret, instated maternity as a medical procedure. Although they had to face the negative criticism from women midwives of their time, nonetheless, through their work, they were recognized by the medical community as prominent obstetricians. With the expertise they gained they improved the forceps, while they thoroughly studied the anatomy of the pelvis. They passed their skills to their students who became the successors of their toil. Starting from two different countries and schools they both managed to shine within their science and leave behind a rich path.

Neonatal brachial plexus palsy – Historical perspective

Neonatal brachial plexus palsy (NBPP), frequently but not always associated with difficulty in the newborn’s passage down the birth canal, has likely been occurring for many centuries. The first recorded case of NBPP in the medical literature was reported in 1768 by William Smellie [1], a prominent British obstetrician. In the latter half of the 19th century, Duchene [2] and Erb [3] described and localized the lesions causing the proximal upper extremity weakness in the deltoid and biceps to the 5th and 6th cervical nerve roots. In 1885, Klumpke described a lower brachial plexus palsy with profound hand weakness and preservation of proximal strength and associated ipsilateral Horner’s syndrome, which she localized to the 8th cervical and 1st thoracic nerve roots [4]. Although the anatomy and probable etiology were thus established, treatment was largely expectant, supported by bracing and physical therapy. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, born during this time period (1895) with left NBPP, was treated only with extensive, even, stressful, and painful therapy to improve his function [5]. These modalities failed, leaving him with an embarrassingly shortened, weak, and withered forearm and hand. Wilhelm blamed the English doctor who attended his birth (his mother was a daughter of Queen Victoria) and consequently developed a hostility to the English, which may have played a role in the decisions leading up to World War I. The tragic consequences of this condition for this involved individual may thus be seen to have far reaching consequences. Surgical intervention was initially described by Kennedy [6] and Taylor [7] in the United States in the first decade of the 20th century. Direct suture repair was performed in these cases and in patients in several other reports. Results were initially described as favorable, but morbidity was high. In 1925, Sever reported on 1100 cases and determined that good outcomeswere not common and that a number of cases were worsened by surgery [8,9]. As a consequence, the conservative attitude regarding NBPP treatment predominated for the next several decades, awaiting and expecting some degree of recovery. In those children who did not recover well, secondary musculoskeletal procedures were occasionally used in an attempt to improve function. Brachial plexus exploration and repair were very rarely performed. Therewas, and still is, considerable controversy over the percentage of neonatal brachial plexus palsy patients who go on to a functionally acceptable spontaneous recovery. Clearly, infants with an upper plexus (Erb’s palsy) acquired perinatally who develop antigravity biceps or deltoid function by 3–4 months seem to progress to an excellent recovery. Those infants who do not meet these criteria are presumed to have a more widespread involvement of the brachial plexus and a more serious degree of injury. Their spontaneous outcome is significantly less functional. The standard regimen of physical therapy, bracing, subsequent bone

William Smellie and William Hunter: two great obstetricians and anatomists

William Smellie and William Hunter: two great obstetricians and anatomists