The short answer appears to be that Shelton’s claims were accepted and reported as fact in many media outlets but there was much greater scepticism among those knowledgeable about the topic.

Don Shelton appears to be a ‘retired chief financial officer’ and a ‘collector of miniature portraits’ from Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of a self-published book, The Real Mr Frankenstein Sir Anthony Carlisle, Medical Murders, and the Social Genesis of Frankenstein, now in its second edition, details of which you can find on Shelton’s website.

The article by Shelton ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ was published in the JRSM and widely reported on throughout the internet and on the Guardian and the BBC as if its thesis offered conclusive proof for its claims. However, it generated a lot of rebuttals within the JRSM, and it was cited by Helen King in an article in the Social History of Medicine on the ‘deprofessionalisation of history’ in the internet age.

Shelton’s states that Smellie and Hunter were 18th century mass murderers as the subjects depicted in their anatomical atlases of the pregnant female body must have been obtained via a murder-to-order system. His argument, in his own words, is that: ‘pregnant subjects were so rare, that the 20 undelivered subjects procured and dissected in 1750–54, for depiction in forensic detail in the anatomical atlases of William Smellie and William Hunter, could only have been obtained by murder-to-order’. He argues that most of the subjects used were late term and that the statistical probability of grave robbers randomly chancing upon such newly interred bodies was vanishingly small giving the mortality rate of such women during the 18th century.

His case rests upon speculative statistical extrapolation and lacks any substantive evidence. The mortality rate for women in childbirth is unknown for the period. Both Smellie and Hunter were medical leaders in midwifery in the mid-to-late 18th century and would have had ‘an extensive network of contacts to obtain the bodies of recently deceased pregnant women’; they were frequently consulted by other medical practitioners for difficult or unusual obstetrical conditions and that some of these cases would have died before delivery is not surprising.

The 34 plates in Hunter’s Gravid Uterus (1774) were taken from 13 subjects which were collected over a 21 year period (1751-1772). None of these cases were acquired during the decade from 1754-1764 and only 5 of them were full-term pregnancies. Of these five women: the first died suddenly in 1750; the second had ‘placenta praevia’; the third had a full term child with breech birth; the fourth had full-term fetus; the fifth appeared to die of natural causes two hours after a natural labour. The other plates in the Atlas do not display full-term foetuses. By Shelton’s own figures – which are debateable – there were 3600 maternal deaths in London during this period. With a network of contacts it is quite possible that these cases could have been collected over such long span of time without resorting to murder. Nor is it the case that body-snatchers, even in the 18th century, worked randomly as Shelton suggests. They had connections with sextons and gravediggers or were sextons and gravediggers and knew where the bodies lay and the conditions that they had died from. If a pregnant woman died in hospital an exhumation could also have been ordered by the hospital doctors. It is likely that the ‘leading steps’ quote by Hunter in Shelton’s article refers to body snatching, which was illegal, rather than ‘murder’. William Hunter’s brother John was known to have contacts with resurrectionists and to have obtained bodies for dissection.

In 1764 Hunter acquired a case of gravid uterus: ‘At last on 11 February. I was so fortunate as to meet with a gravid uterus, to which from that time, all the hours have been dedicated which have been at my disposal’. After such a wait, it seems unlikely that Hunter would have conspired to murder a pregnant woman suffering from this condition.

Smellie also had a very large practice and would have an extensive medical network in London. His atlas was published in 1754 when he had been in practice for some 15 years and would have been directly or indirectly involved in well over 1,000 labours, some of whom would have died before delivery. Of the 39 tables in his atlas, many were diagrams and of the remainder not all were taken from real life and instead specimens preserved with wax or plaster casts were used.

Sources

Don Shelton (2010) The Emperor’s New Clothes. JRSM 103(2): 46-50

Don Shelton (2012) Letter: Don’t forget those who were murdered to order. BMJ 344:e552

Don Shelton (2012) The Internet and ‘New’ Historians. Social History of Medicine 25(1): 222-231

Janette C Allotey (2010) William Smellie and William Hunter Accused of Murder … JRSM 103(5): 166

Helen King (2012) History without Historians? Medical History and the Internet. Social History of Medicine 25(1): 212-221.

Man-Midwifery Under Assault (Again). Dittick Museum Blog

ADG Roberts TF Baskett AA Calder S Arulkumaran (2010) William Smellie and William Hunter: Two Great Obstetricians and Anatomists. JRSM 103(5): 205-206

Matthew F Kaufman and Nigel A Malcolm Smith (2010). JRSM 103(5): 166