William Smellie and William Hunter: two great obstetricians and anatomists

William Smellie and William Hunter: two great obstetricians and anatomists.

William Smellie

MY object today is to try, I am sure very inadequately, to tell you something of the life of that illustrious fellow countryman of mine, William Smellie, the Master of British Midwifery, who was born in Lanark in the year 1697. Smellie lived during the reigns of four sovereigns-Queen Anne and the first three Hanoverian Georges. He saw the union of the Scottish and English Parliaments in 1707, a...

William Smellie

DOCTOR FLEETWOOD has apparently spent some hAppy years in browsing through the medical archives of Ireland, and has presented to us a book which is not wvithout interest, although, in hiis own words, it is "not an exhaustive account of Irish medical practice throughout the centuries. " The opening chapters dealing with earlier history are full of interest and pleasantly written. We find that he...

William Smellie (1697?1763)

William Smellie and the Maternity Mortality Problem

For our consideration of the subject of Maternal Mortality I ask you to cast your minds back nearly two hundred years. In 1736, a London surgeon, Mr John Douglas, wrote a pamphlet in which he deplored the lamentable state of midwifery practice in London at that time. He expressed surprise that whilst other departments of surgery had been practised and improved by men "the operation necessary fo...