For over 250 years, they have commanded respect from doctors. But were the founders of British obstretics, William Hunter and William Smellie, really serial killers?
The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine(JRSM) claims that they were. A detailed historical study accuses the doctors of soliciting the killing of dozens of women, many in the latter stages of pregnancy, to dissect their corpses.
This became known "Burking", which was killing people for order usually for medical research. The names comes from Burke who, along with Hare, became Britain's most famous bodysnatchers.
According to the research, the two men were between them responsible for the murders of 35-40 pregnant women and their unborn children between 1749 and 1774.
Founders of British obstetrics 'were callous murderers'
William Hunter and William Smellie commissioned a regular supply of corpses so they could study the physical effects of pregnancy, argues a respected historian
They are giants of medicine, pioneers of the care that women receive during childbirth and were the founding fathers of obstetrics. The names of William Hunter and William Smellie still inspire respect among today's doctors, more than 250 years since they made their contributions to healthcare. Such were the duo's reputations as outstanding physicians that the clienteles of their private practices included the rich and famous of mid-18th-century London.
But were they also serial killers? New research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM) claims that they were. A detailed historical study accuses the doctors of soliciting the killing of dozens of women, many in the latter stages of pregnancy, to dissect their corpses.
William Hunter
William Smellie
"Smellie and Hunter were responsible for a series of 18th-century 'burking' murders of pregnant women, with a death total greater than the combined murders committed by Burke and Hare and Jack the Ripper," writes Don Shelton, a historian.
"Burking" involved murdering people to order, usually for medical research.
According to Shelton, the two men were between them responsible for the murders of 35-40 pregnant women and their unborn children. Acting separately, and using henchmen to deliver their supply, they organised a killing spree in London between 1749 and 1755 and, after a period of inactivity enforced by mounting suspicion about the source of their corpses, resumed between 1764 and 1774.
Motivated by ego, personal rivalry and a shared desire to benefit from being acclaimed as the foremost childbirth doctors of their time, Hunter and Smellie sacrificed life after life in their quests to study pregnancy's physical effects and to develop new techniques, the author says. "Although it sounds absolutely incredible, the circumstantial literary evidence suggests they were most likely competing with each other in experimenting with secret caesarean sections on unconscious, or freshly murdered, victims, with a view to extracting and reviving the babies," Shelton told the Observer.
William Burke and William Hare are the world's most famous bodysnatchers. Between November 1827 and October 1828, Burke and Hare murdered 17 people in Edinburgh. The corpses of their victims were sold to provide material for dissection. Their purchaser was Doctor Robert Knox, a private anatomy lecturer whose students were drawn from Edinburgh Medical College. Burke was executed for his crimes in January 1829. Hare was released in February 1829, and many tales tell of him as a blind beggar on the streets of London, having been mobbed and thrown in a lime pit.
Shelton examined the men's anatomical atlases, containing detailed images of pregnant women who had been opened up, and medical literature and the causes of death in London at the time. Glasgow's Hunterian museum and gallery is named after Scottish-born Hunter, who in 1762 became physician to Queen Charlotte, wife of George III. He helped her to deliver the future king, George IV.
Smellie, a fellow Scot, is no less distinguished. From Witchcraft to Wisdom, a textbook on the history of obstetric and gynaecological medicine, hails him as "the greatest obstetrician in the history of British obstetrics". He has also been called "the father of British midwifery".
Shelton, though, regards the duo as on a par with Burke and Hare, who murdered 17 citizens of Edinburgh in 1827 and 1828, selling their remains to a local anatomist. The London of Hunter and Smellie's time was unhealthy and semi-anarchic, and early death from disease was widespread, as was grave robbing. In his JRSM paper, Shelton claims to prove that the rival doctors could not have obtained their supply of corpses by any other means than murder. It was rare for mothers-to-be to die or be murdered soon before they were due to give birth, says the historian. People from poorhouses who died were usually old, unwell or children. Thus the grave robbers of the time could not have fulfilled the obstetricians' need for such a specific type of female, concludes Shelton.
Each used an assistant to commission killers, he says, naming Dr Colin Mackenzie as Smellie's accomplice and John Hunter – William's brother, who was a celebrated anatomist – as his helper. Young women from the countryside were apparently favourite targets in a city where plenty of people "disappeared".
"There is great suspicion about the abundance of undelivered ninth-month corpses procured, dissected and depicted in the anatomical atlases of Smellie and Hunter," writes Shelton. "The impossibility of supply from random resurrections, taken with a careful analysis of events, and of 18th-century medical literature, shows compelling evidence for burking."
By 1755 rumours were circulating that the women in Smellie's journal had been murdered, and associates began pressing him on their origins. "As a result Smellie and Hunter both halted their research, both presumably fearing trial and execution," although Hunter – who used his links to powerful families to ensure no investigation was ever undertaken – resumed ordering murders, about once a year, in 1764, Shelton adds.
Anthony Kenny, a gynaecologist in London for 40 years until his retirement in 2007, said: "These two guys are my heroes. The idea that they could have been involved in the murder of subjects is absolutely staggering." Kenny is now the curator of the museum of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. "They were the first proper obstetricians in the country because of their pioneering work practising what was then still a new branch of medicine."
While Kenny describes Shelton's paper as "extremely impressive" in its research, he cannot believe that his heroes were guilty of such terrible crimes. The trade in corpses was very lucrative and probably attracted unsavoury, unscrupulous characters, he pointed out. "And it could be that they didn't make proper inquiries as to the origins of the bodies, and so may not have known that the women were murdered."
Ludmilla Jordanova, a professor of modern history at King's College London who specialises in the history of medicine, says Shelton's assertion that Hunter and Smellie could not have come across so many dead pregnant women from any other source as "a striking claim. Important research… is revealing the complexities of anatomical activities in 18th-century London. This is an exciting and controversial area of historical investigation, and it invites more meticulous research and judicious research."
Shelton says his research "turned out to be a bit like a thinking person's Da Vinci Code, but in this case involving facts, not fiction. Although the conclusion of burking is shocking, to quote Sherlock Holmes, 'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth.'"
Between the Tudor era and the early nineteenth century, the only legal source of corpses for dissection was the gallows. Not enough bodies were provided to supply the proliferating number of anatomy schools and their burgeoning numbers of students. Body snatchers (‘grave-robbers’ or ‘resurrection men’) generally obtained fresh corpses from new graves. Their work was crucial to the historical development of anatomical knowledge and expertise, particularly during their heyday, from the 1780s to 1832. After this the Anatomy Act changed the legal basis of corpse provision.
The earliest grave-robbers were surgeon– anatomists or their pupils. Apprentices' indentures issued by the Edinburgh College of Surgeons in the 1720s forbad trainees to exhume the dead — which suggests that they had been doing so. A contemporary book referred with heavy irony to ‘resurrections’ by the London Corporation of Corpse Stealers in a number of churchyards. Great museums of medical specimens were being established during this era, and, as with natural history collections, private auctions provided a form of brokerage by which owners could exchange specimens of human origin. Surgical exams at first tacitly, and later openly, recognized that bodies were being procured beyond legal means and dissected in unofficial premises.
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The execution of William Burke on The Lawnmarket, 28th January 1829[/FONT]
Accurate estimates of the demand are difficult to come by. The first period for which figures are available is the early nineteenth century, when 700 medical students were enrolled annually in London alone, each of whom expected to engage in hands-on dissection on three or more corpses.
Until the 1830s, dissection was considered by law a fate worse than death, a ‘further Terror and peculiar Mark of Infamy’ to public execution itself — to be inflicted upon the worst of murderers. Only beheading; hanging, drawing and quartering; or burning alive exceeded it in severity. There was a widely held belief in some incorporeal association between the fate of the corpse and that of the soul. Dissection mutilated and dismembered the body, and was specifically designed to deny the wrongdoer a grave: in popular belief the spirit denied this repose was doomed to wander, and its future resurrection was in doubt.
The public viewed dissection with terror. Body snatching was greatly feared, and inflicted profound psychological pain upon surviving relatives and friends. Corpses were most desired by the anatomists, and most lucrative to the body snatchers, at their freshest: at the time mourners were experiencing raw grief. Entire communities, on hearing a rumour of body snatchers at work, would repair to the graveyard to dig for their relatives. Severe violence against body snatchers, riots, and even the demolition of anatomy schools could result.
Watchmen, sometimes with guns and dogs, were employed by local inhabitants to protect their dead. Many burial grounds had extra security features. In poor districts, coffins were buried in stacks, reaching almost to the surface, and ordinary folk could do little to protect their dead, other than to make things difficult for the body snatchers. People would delay burial, mix straw with the earth returned to the grave to hinder the body snatchers' shovels, or share stints of watching at the graveside. The rich could purchase better security. Any means by which burial could be made more secure was sure to find a ready market. Better quality coffins were described as ‘stout’, and extra coffin nails became a status symbol. Double and triple coffins, and lead coffins, became popular. Ingenious inventors devised and patented special coffin bands, locks, screws, and even cast iron coffins. Yet the wealthy remained vulnerable. Body snatchers were extremely efficient. Sir Astley Cooper, a leading Regency surgeon–anatomist, confidently stated in 1828 that if he was so disposed he could obtain the body of anyone — whoever they were, and of whatever station in life: ready money was always the key.
Prices were affected by market-wide considerations — as when good weather rendered mortality lower than expected — and by local conditions. For example, increased vigilance in one locality could cause greater expense in obtaining corpses from another. Corpses lost value swiftly due to the lack of adequate preservatives: pickling, salting, and other forms of preservation known from food use were used, but neither refrigeration nor formaldehyde had yet been developed, and prices were seasonally variable. An average adult corpse in good condition yielded an average price, one damaged by autopsy or amputation had considerably lower value. Rising demand, and sometimes severe shortages, caused prices to fluctuate, but the general drift was upwards. In the 1790s, one London gang was said to have been selling adult corpses for ‘two guineas and a crown’, children's bodies were sold by the inch: ‘six shillings for the first foot, and nine [pence] per inch for all it measures more in length’. In the 1820s, when the trade was more difficult, adult corpses cost between ten and twenty guineas apiece.
Collectors paid much greater sums for medical curiosities. In one rare but well-known case in the 1780s, the anatomist John Hunter paid the enormous sum of £500 for the corpse of the ‘Irish Giant’, whose huge skeleton is still displayed in the Royal College of Surgeons' Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London.
Body snatchers usually worked at night. Daytime reconnaissance informed them of fresh burials, depth, and whether more than one body might be obtained by one spate of digging. Their tools were simple: wooden shovels to lessen noise, a rope with hooks or a crowbar to pull up the coffin lid, and a couple of sacks. A hole would be dug at the head end of a fresh grave; the soft soil would be removed and heaped on sacking. Once visible, the coffin lid would be forced. The weight of earth on the rest of the coffin served as a counter-weight, so when pressure was applied the lid would break across, and the body pulled out. Shrouds or other clothing on the body would be thrown back, and the earth replaced by tipping up the sacking. It was important to leave the grave tidy: if suspicions were aroused future attempts upon the same graveyard could meet with danger. A look-out would be waiting outside with a cart.
In times of dearth, body snatchers would try other sources: country churchyards further afield would be raided if they were on good communications routes — road, canal, or sea. Private vaults were entered secretly, by bribery or force. Bodies were imported from France and Ireland in casks. Body snatchers posed as grieving relatives at public mortuaries, or stole bodies awaiting inquest.
In law, the body did not constitute property and could therefore neither be bought, sold, or stolen. Body snatchers were convicted, however. A husband and wife, for example, were transported for the theft of grave clothes. Body snatchers generally took the brunt of popular obloquy and judicial punishment for grave-robbery, but the prosecution and conviction of an anatomist in the spring of 1828 — for unlawfully conspiring to obtain and receive a body — effectively incriminated anatomical enquiry, and at last caused Parliamentary action.
The Select Committee on Anatomy recommended the requisition of the bodies of individuals dying in workhouses or hospitals, too poor to pay for their own funerals. Despite opposition, these findings were eventually embodied in the Anatomy Act of 1832. Grave-robbers were rendered redundant by a new breed of body snatcher: the mortuary attendant. Although dissection lost its association with execution for murder, this now adhered to the shame of a death in poverty. It is only in the NHS era that donation has become the major source of corpses for anatomy.
guardian.co.uk
www.encyclopedia.com
The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine(JRSM) claims that they were. A detailed historical study accuses the doctors of soliciting the killing of dozens of women, many in the latter stages of pregnancy, to dissect their corpses.
This became known "Burking", which was killing people for order usually for medical research. The names comes from Burke who, along with Hare, became Britain's most famous bodysnatchers.
According to the research, the two men were between them responsible for the murders of 35-40 pregnant women and their unborn children between 1749 and 1774.
Founders of British obstetrics 'were callous murderers'
William Hunter and William Smellie commissioned a regular supply of corpses so they could study the physical effects of pregnancy, argues a respected historian
They are giants of medicine, pioneers of the care that women receive during childbirth and were the founding fathers of obstetrics. The names of William Hunter and William Smellie still inspire respect among today's doctors, more than 250 years since they made their contributions to healthcare. Such were the duo's reputations as outstanding physicians that the clienteles of their private practices included the rich and famous of mid-18th-century London.
But were they also serial killers? New research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM) claims that they were. A detailed historical study accuses the doctors of soliciting the killing of dozens of women, many in the latter stages of pregnancy, to dissect their corpses.
William Hunter
William Smellie
"Smellie and Hunter were responsible for a series of 18th-century 'burking' murders of pregnant women, with a death total greater than the combined murders committed by Burke and Hare and Jack the Ripper," writes Don Shelton, a historian.
"Burking" involved murdering people to order, usually for medical research.
According to Shelton, the two men were between them responsible for the murders of 35-40 pregnant women and their unborn children. Acting separately, and using henchmen to deliver their supply, they organised a killing spree in London between 1749 and 1755 and, after a period of inactivity enforced by mounting suspicion about the source of their corpses, resumed between 1764 and 1774.
Motivated by ego, personal rivalry and a shared desire to benefit from being acclaimed as the foremost childbirth doctors of their time, Hunter and Smellie sacrificed life after life in their quests to study pregnancy's physical effects and to develop new techniques, the author says. "Although it sounds absolutely incredible, the circumstantial literary evidence suggests they were most likely competing with each other in experimenting with secret caesarean sections on unconscious, or freshly murdered, victims, with a view to extracting and reviving the babies," Shelton told the Observer.
William Burke and William Hare are the world's most famous bodysnatchers. Between November 1827 and October 1828, Burke and Hare murdered 17 people in Edinburgh. The corpses of their victims were sold to provide material for dissection. Their purchaser was Doctor Robert Knox, a private anatomy lecturer whose students were drawn from Edinburgh Medical College. Burke was executed for his crimes in January 1829. Hare was released in February 1829, and many tales tell of him as a blind beggar on the streets of London, having been mobbed and thrown in a lime pit.
Shelton examined the men's anatomical atlases, containing detailed images of pregnant women who had been opened up, and medical literature and the causes of death in London at the time. Glasgow's Hunterian museum and gallery is named after Scottish-born Hunter, who in 1762 became physician to Queen Charlotte, wife of George III. He helped her to deliver the future king, George IV.
Smellie, a fellow Scot, is no less distinguished. From Witchcraft to Wisdom, a textbook on the history of obstetric and gynaecological medicine, hails him as "the greatest obstetrician in the history of British obstetrics". He has also been called "the father of British midwifery".
Shelton, though, regards the duo as on a par with Burke and Hare, who murdered 17 citizens of Edinburgh in 1827 and 1828, selling their remains to a local anatomist. The London of Hunter and Smellie's time was unhealthy and semi-anarchic, and early death from disease was widespread, as was grave robbing. In his JRSM paper, Shelton claims to prove that the rival doctors could not have obtained their supply of corpses by any other means than murder. It was rare for mothers-to-be to die or be murdered soon before they were due to give birth, says the historian. People from poorhouses who died were usually old, unwell or children. Thus the grave robbers of the time could not have fulfilled the obstetricians' need for such a specific type of female, concludes Shelton.
Each used an assistant to commission killers, he says, naming Dr Colin Mackenzie as Smellie's accomplice and John Hunter – William's brother, who was a celebrated anatomist – as his helper. Young women from the countryside were apparently favourite targets in a city where plenty of people "disappeared".
"There is great suspicion about the abundance of undelivered ninth-month corpses procured, dissected and depicted in the anatomical atlases of Smellie and Hunter," writes Shelton. "The impossibility of supply from random resurrections, taken with a careful analysis of events, and of 18th-century medical literature, shows compelling evidence for burking."
By 1755 rumours were circulating that the women in Smellie's journal had been murdered, and associates began pressing him on their origins. "As a result Smellie and Hunter both halted their research, both presumably fearing trial and execution," although Hunter – who used his links to powerful families to ensure no investigation was ever undertaken – resumed ordering murders, about once a year, in 1764, Shelton adds.
Anthony Kenny, a gynaecologist in London for 40 years until his retirement in 2007, said: "These two guys are my heroes. The idea that they could have been involved in the murder of subjects is absolutely staggering." Kenny is now the curator of the museum of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. "They were the first proper obstetricians in the country because of their pioneering work practising what was then still a new branch of medicine."
While Kenny describes Shelton's paper as "extremely impressive" in its research, he cannot believe that his heroes were guilty of such terrible crimes. The trade in corpses was very lucrative and probably attracted unsavoury, unscrupulous characters, he pointed out. "And it could be that they didn't make proper inquiries as to the origins of the bodies, and so may not have known that the women were murdered."
Ludmilla Jordanova, a professor of modern history at King's College London who specialises in the history of medicine, says Shelton's assertion that Hunter and Smellie could not have come across so many dead pregnant women from any other source as "a striking claim. Important research… is revealing the complexities of anatomical activities in 18th-century London. This is an exciting and controversial area of historical investigation, and it invites more meticulous research and judicious research."
Shelton says his research "turned out to be a bit like a thinking person's Da Vinci Code, but in this case involving facts, not fiction. Although the conclusion of burking is shocking, to quote Sherlock Holmes, 'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth.'"
Between the Tudor era and the early nineteenth century, the only legal source of corpses for dissection was the gallows. Not enough bodies were provided to supply the proliferating number of anatomy schools and their burgeoning numbers of students. Body snatchers (‘grave-robbers’ or ‘resurrection men’) generally obtained fresh corpses from new graves. Their work was crucial to the historical development of anatomical knowledge and expertise, particularly during their heyday, from the 1780s to 1832. After this the Anatomy Act changed the legal basis of corpse provision.
The earliest grave-robbers were surgeon– anatomists or their pupils. Apprentices' indentures issued by the Edinburgh College of Surgeons in the 1720s forbad trainees to exhume the dead — which suggests that they had been doing so. A contemporary book referred with heavy irony to ‘resurrections’ by the London Corporation of Corpse Stealers in a number of churchyards. Great museums of medical specimens were being established during this era, and, as with natural history collections, private auctions provided a form of brokerage by which owners could exchange specimens of human origin. Surgical exams at first tacitly, and later openly, recognized that bodies were being procured beyond legal means and dissected in unofficial premises.
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The execution of William Burke on The Lawnmarket, 28th January 1829[/FONT]
Accurate estimates of the demand are difficult to come by. The first period for which figures are available is the early nineteenth century, when 700 medical students were enrolled annually in London alone, each of whom expected to engage in hands-on dissection on three or more corpses.
Until the 1830s, dissection was considered by law a fate worse than death, a ‘further Terror and peculiar Mark of Infamy’ to public execution itself — to be inflicted upon the worst of murderers. Only beheading; hanging, drawing and quartering; or burning alive exceeded it in severity. There was a widely held belief in some incorporeal association between the fate of the corpse and that of the soul. Dissection mutilated and dismembered the body, and was specifically designed to deny the wrongdoer a grave: in popular belief the spirit denied this repose was doomed to wander, and its future resurrection was in doubt.
The public viewed dissection with terror. Body snatching was greatly feared, and inflicted profound psychological pain upon surviving relatives and friends. Corpses were most desired by the anatomists, and most lucrative to the body snatchers, at their freshest: at the time mourners were experiencing raw grief. Entire communities, on hearing a rumour of body snatchers at work, would repair to the graveyard to dig for their relatives. Severe violence against body snatchers, riots, and even the demolition of anatomy schools could result.
Watchmen, sometimes with guns and dogs, were employed by local inhabitants to protect their dead. Many burial grounds had extra security features. In poor districts, coffins were buried in stacks, reaching almost to the surface, and ordinary folk could do little to protect their dead, other than to make things difficult for the body snatchers. People would delay burial, mix straw with the earth returned to the grave to hinder the body snatchers' shovels, or share stints of watching at the graveside. The rich could purchase better security. Any means by which burial could be made more secure was sure to find a ready market. Better quality coffins were described as ‘stout’, and extra coffin nails became a status symbol. Double and triple coffins, and lead coffins, became popular. Ingenious inventors devised and patented special coffin bands, locks, screws, and even cast iron coffins. Yet the wealthy remained vulnerable. Body snatchers were extremely efficient. Sir Astley Cooper, a leading Regency surgeon–anatomist, confidently stated in 1828 that if he was so disposed he could obtain the body of anyone — whoever they were, and of whatever station in life: ready money was always the key.
Prices were affected by market-wide considerations — as when good weather rendered mortality lower than expected — and by local conditions. For example, increased vigilance in one locality could cause greater expense in obtaining corpses from another. Corpses lost value swiftly due to the lack of adequate preservatives: pickling, salting, and other forms of preservation known from food use were used, but neither refrigeration nor formaldehyde had yet been developed, and prices were seasonally variable. An average adult corpse in good condition yielded an average price, one damaged by autopsy or amputation had considerably lower value. Rising demand, and sometimes severe shortages, caused prices to fluctuate, but the general drift was upwards. In the 1790s, one London gang was said to have been selling adult corpses for ‘two guineas and a crown’, children's bodies were sold by the inch: ‘six shillings for the first foot, and nine [pence] per inch for all it measures more in length’. In the 1820s, when the trade was more difficult, adult corpses cost between ten and twenty guineas apiece.
Collectors paid much greater sums for medical curiosities. In one rare but well-known case in the 1780s, the anatomist John Hunter paid the enormous sum of £500 for the corpse of the ‘Irish Giant’, whose huge skeleton is still displayed in the Royal College of Surgeons' Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London.
Body snatchers usually worked at night. Daytime reconnaissance informed them of fresh burials, depth, and whether more than one body might be obtained by one spate of digging. Their tools were simple: wooden shovels to lessen noise, a rope with hooks or a crowbar to pull up the coffin lid, and a couple of sacks. A hole would be dug at the head end of a fresh grave; the soft soil would be removed and heaped on sacking. Once visible, the coffin lid would be forced. The weight of earth on the rest of the coffin served as a counter-weight, so when pressure was applied the lid would break across, and the body pulled out. Shrouds or other clothing on the body would be thrown back, and the earth replaced by tipping up the sacking. It was important to leave the grave tidy: if suspicions were aroused future attempts upon the same graveyard could meet with danger. A look-out would be waiting outside with a cart.
In times of dearth, body snatchers would try other sources: country churchyards further afield would be raided if they were on good communications routes — road, canal, or sea. Private vaults were entered secretly, by bribery or force. Bodies were imported from France and Ireland in casks. Body snatchers posed as grieving relatives at public mortuaries, or stole bodies awaiting inquest.
In law, the body did not constitute property and could therefore neither be bought, sold, or stolen. Body snatchers were convicted, however. A husband and wife, for example, were transported for the theft of grave clothes. Body snatchers generally took the brunt of popular obloquy and judicial punishment for grave-robbery, but the prosecution and conviction of an anatomist in the spring of 1828 — for unlawfully conspiring to obtain and receive a body — effectively incriminated anatomical enquiry, and at last caused Parliamentary action.
The Select Committee on Anatomy recommended the requisition of the bodies of individuals dying in workhouses or hospitals, too poor to pay for their own funerals. Despite opposition, these findings were eventually embodied in the Anatomy Act of 1832. Grave-robbers were rendered redundant by a new breed of body snatcher: the mortuary attendant. Although dissection lost its association with execution for murder, this now adhered to the shame of a death in poverty. It is only in the NHS era that donation has become the major source of corpses for anatomy.
guardian.co.uk
www.encyclopedia.com
