William Smellie (obstetrician)

William Smellie

William Smellie (5 February 1697, Lanark – 5 March 1763, Lanark) was a Scottish obstetrician.

Life

He practiced medicine before getting a license, but enrolled later at the University of Glasgow and received his M.D. degree in 1745. After training in obstetrics in London and Paris, he opened a practice in London and began teaching. He invented a "machine", an obstetrical manikin, for instructions. Smellie described the mechanism of labour, designed obstetrical forceps, devised a maneuver to deliver the head of a breech, and published his teachings. He is believed to have painted his own portrait.

Use of forceps by W. Smellie

Controversy

Smellie, together with his former pupil William Hunter and his brother John Hunter, was accused to be involved in either murdering pregnant women or of showing a callous disregard for where his corpses came from. The arguments is the large number of the pregnant corpses Hunter was able to obtain. However, the debate continues and this accusation is widely contested by other scholars.

Legacy

The tomb in which William Smellie (and later his wife) was buried still stands in the St. Kentigerns section of the state run Lanark graveyard. The William Smellie Memorial Hospital which provided maternity services in Lanark closed in the early 1990s and was re-located to a unit at the Law Hospital in Carluke. This was also closed recently and maternity services moved to Wishaw General Hospital.

References

• Speert, H (1958). Essays in Eponymy: Obstetric and Gynecologic Milestones. Macmillan.
• Lanark Museum

External links

• William Smellie: A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgment, of the practice of midwifery (London, 1749)]. Selected pages scanned from the original work. Historical Anatomies on the Web. US National Library of Medicine.
• Media related to William Smellie (obstetrician) at Wikimedia Commons