buying the beef

I’m not convinced by this:

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.

"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.

Thing is, you can never rule it out: the mid eighteenth century was a ruthless age with rudimentary policing. The argument here is that the pair, out of rivalry, killed up to 40 women in late term pregnancy, basically in order to see what happened, whether the foetus could be revived and miraculously turned into a baby (which technically it can be if they do it fast enough. So what happened to the kids?), and so they could produce illustrated dissection monographs about the actual workings of late pregnancy.

The murder theory rests on the idea that they would have been unable to get enough of this narrow subcategory of corpses by natural means. I’d contest that. The deaths took place over two periods totaling 25 years. Given the mortality rate in London at the time, it doesn’t strike me as much of a stretch that they would have been able to buy the beef by legitimate – or at least generally accepted - means. They’d also have the contacts to be able to get hold of them quickly.

Additionally, says Shelton,

"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.

What the “circumstantial literary evidence” seems to amount to is basically folklore: sinister assistants, pretty young wenches lured from the countryside, etc. Taken as a whole it sounds like Fielding in one of his gorier moods, maybe a sequel to Jonathan Wilde the Great.

Comments

[Chris Williams]

This is Not My Period Mate, so I'm going to reserve judgement until I contact my C18th Murder Adviser, who knows better than me - and indeed than anyone else.

But speaking personally, I will only be convinced by some pretty special regression analysis, and I note that if I wanted to prove a controversial case using the research methods of (say) history I would submit it to a (say) history journal rather than a (say) medicine one, in order to make sure that the editor is going to know the right peer reviewers to send it out to to make sure it gets a credible look.

[Gareth Rees]

Surely all they had to do was fail to wash their hands, and let puerperal fever do the rest?

[Chris Williams]

Perhaps trickier when you want to get the foetus inside the womb. I've checked out Don Sheldon's website, and he's a man with a book to sell. This not a bad thing: I'm a man with a book to sell, and so are many of my friends - many of the rest of my friends being women with books to sell. But I can't get at the JRSM article yet, so I can't check out the footnotes. Prediction: if he does not reveal knowledge of Liz Hurren's work on the really quite frighteningly effective way that some poor law unions could ship a cadaver to a Cambridge dissection table in the mid C19th isn't there, and yet his argument relies on negative evidence, I will not take his thesis very seriously. Big trade in recently-dead bodies, some perhaps helped on their way by plausibly-deniable contacts [this is what we already know], yes: yr actual doctors doing the killing [this is the new bit], no.

[Martin Wisse]

It sounds too "Shakespeare was really Baconish" too me.

[Chris Williams]

That appears to be the tradition he's coming out of - working out that a prominent surgeon wrote a then-famous novel under a female pseudonym. But it lacks the 'Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays cos he was a pleb' starting point which needs to be invoked to kick off Occam off the ass all the Shakespeare theories.

I wonder in fact whether DS's press release actually said something like 'created a demand for corpses which was then filled by murderers', whereas the press has headlined into 'were serial killers'.

The problem with relying on accusations of Burking as mood music evidence is that it was a trope which easily produced false accusation - such as the one that kicked off the Sheffield Medical School riot in 18236.

[Chris Williams]

Look, it's going to happen, OK? Or perhaps I typed the date wrong. It was 1836.

[dsquared]

I presumed that you were talking about a Doctor Who episode.

[Chris Williams]

News just in - I've got hold of a pdf and it's bollocks. DS is presupposing that resurrectionists just dug at random in new graves, thus it's pretty unlikely that they'd find the 20 or so women in the 9th month who died every year. This is vanishingly unlikely, given what we know about the trade in bdoies between poor law institutions and universities in the C19th. And sure enough, no sign of Hurren in the bibliography. History FAIL.

Moral - don't trust what doctors write, or indeed choose to publish, about the history of medicine.

[hellblazer]

Hmm, googling led me to what seems like a (momentarily?) free copy of
the Shelton article. Have yet to go through it properly but a quick scan uncovers the phrase "the random probability of..." and no real discussion, as CW says above, of dependent or conditional probabilities or other confounding variables. So, erm, no.

They're not too impressed over at Obsidian Wings, neither.

(Also: what's Shelton's background? Google is just giving me all the 2nd-hand, take-him-at-his-word descriptions of him as "a historian", but that sounds awfully like describing me as "a literary critc", given that I read a fair bit, and find fault with much of it.)