Mr Wilson, I fear you would not enjoy the camaraderie of the dissection room or post mortem theatre.

the 18th-century obstetricians William Hunter and William Smellie were probably serial killers, given that they obtained the corpses of the pregnant women that they experimented upon through "burking" ? having people murdered to order

Why so shocking? They needed to practise & to conduct experiments in order (they'd tell themselves) to advance their understanding. This was the 18th Century, hardly our own enlightened times. These were men, undoubtedly of a certain class & social standing, who clearly cared more for their position & reputation than the lives of others. Policing & the media were still in their infancy, so it was much more likely that they'd get away with it. And, how many others behaving similarly up & down the country got away with it too?

And to which social class might the hapless victims have belonged? Now, let me guess...

Good Lord, haven't you heard of Burke and Hare, the resurrectionists?

Good Lord, haven't you heard of Burke and Hare, the resurrectionists?

I think that the use of "burking" as a verb meaning to obtain cadavers by means of murder indicates the positive.

Oh, and another thing ... If the medical profession is in need of a fit of self-examination due to serial killers in the ranks, just imagine the tortured conscience of the postal service.

Would you trust a pair of doctors called 'Hunter & Smellie'? No, really?

"Frankly, the more important question to consider is not whether Hunter and Smellie were serial killers, but rather why so many in the medical profession seem to end up being able to be described in this way. What is it about some of those who join this profession, and who must have at one stage set out to help others, change so much that, over time, they start to kill and begin to take lives instead of saving them? Is this the fault of the individual medical professional (perhaps their motives were always murderous?), or rather the responsibility of the culture in which they are trained, and given power and responsibility?"

Having met a few doctors over the years some of whom might be described as having what could be thought of as a 'god complex', I wonder is it that some in the medical profession get hooked on a feeling of omnipotence and some, a small minority, cannot handle these feelings?

If this is so maybe there needs to be greater care in the selection of recruits into the medical profession, possibly including the use of physological profiling?

@andleberry

I think that the use of "burking" as a verb meaning to obtain cadavers by means of murder indicates the positive.

Was being sarcastic. It's unlikely that the medical profession have always been whiter than white and it's probably only since the late victorian era that doctors became acceptable as equals in polite society. Prior to that they were probably just other tradesmen dealing with the hoi poloi.

The old joke that doctors bury their mistakes is still true but it also goes for their crimes. I suspect that in the past more than a few doctors will have carried out highly dubious and unethical practices against people who couldn't answer back or defend themselves, all in the cause of "medical research of course".

Because someone is a doctor, lawyers, or any of the other "professions" doesn't make them any more honest or better than the rest of humanity.

I hear that Robert De Niro is going to star in a movie about Harold Shipman...

Going to be call the "Old Dear Hunter"

It's unlikely that the medical profession have always been whiter than white and it's probably only since the late victorian era that doctors became acceptable as equals in polite society. Prior to that they were probably just other tradesmen dealing with the hoi poloi.

Actual doctoring - as opposed to, say, midwifery - has been a profession requiring a university education, and hence open only to the sons of the wealthy, for a very long time. Along with the clergy and the law it was one of the few respectable occupations for the younger sons of aristocrats who did not stand to inherit but who nonetheless required a position. It wasn't until the second half of the nineteenth century that procuring the services of a doctor actually provided any medical benefit, but there was not a time when gentlefolk would send anyone bearing the elevated title of "Doctor" to the rear entrance like a coal merchant.

Are there any statistics to show that the medical profession is more likely to harbour serial killers?

Addendum to the above:

Surgeons, of course, are another matter. They were common tradesmen, usually butchers or more famously barbers (who would have the appropriate tools) with a sideline.

Doctors are more 'hands-on' , allowing for direct murder. Other professions (eg lawyers) have had characters responsible for many,many deaths, but they kill from a distance. No profession is 'whiter-than-white'.

I was going to query whether the medical profession is really so well
represented in this, but it seems that it is.
I suppose if you have the desire for power over life or death, then it's a good profession to enter.

Although, the most common occupation for a serial killer, according to the FBI, is lorry driver.

Apparently during "the Troubles" surgeons in Northern Ireland were envied by their colleagues in England because they had so many more interesting injuries to practice their skills on....

I believe that Hunter and Smellie were serial killers. Medicine does seem to have attracted more than its fair share of pathological criminals over the centuries. At a time when murder was difficult to detect and the victims of little social significance, it must have been all too easy for ambitious physicians to play God.

Our own recent history has produced medical murderers like Mengele.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a great chilling short story called "The Body Snatchers", based on the true story of Burke and Hare.

If you google on "medical murderers" you get 1,210,000 hits. To be fair to John Bodkin Adams, it should be pointed out that he was in fact acquitted of murder, although the first statement he mad on being charged "can they prove it?" indicates a pretty trusting jury.....

"You killed him!"

"No I did not! I gave him life..."

Actual doctoring - as opposed to, say, midwifery - has been a profession requiring a university education,

I think that you'll find that they started of as barbers, "magicians", con artists and snake oil salemen.

Probably the only ones who had any degree of legitimacy would have been the village wise women (and occasional man) who helped deliver the babies and tend the sick and elderly using herbs. Most ended up burnt at the stake as witches/warlocks to make way for the new practice of medicine which would be male dominated.

From Cure to Kill.

This title suggests and essay should include the numerous physicians, particularly surgeons who work in a profit oriented society, whose major incentive is money/profit, not the welfare of their patients. Beware of surgeons, particularly ORTHOPAEDIC GENTLEMEN and so-called SPINE surgeons always willing to cut open backs, neck to lumbar region. Make sure you look at outcomes.

bailliegillies,

I think that you'll find that they started of as barbers, "magicians", con artists and snake oil salemen.

All those occupations existed as well, but the practice of medicine has been taught in universities for centuries.

However ...

Probably the only ones who had any degree of legitimacy would have been the village wise women (and occasional man) who helped deliver the babies and tend the sick and elderly using herbs. Most ended up burnt at the stake as witches/warlocks to make way for the new practice of medicine which would be male dominated.

You have now made your level of knowledge of history so apparent that there is no point continuing this conversation any further with you.

Horrible, and evidently plausible, as this theory is, it is depressing to think that these two distinguished gents probably killed vastly more women - bona fide patients - accidentally!

18th and 19th century obstetrics was a disaster area, above all because of simple lack of hygiene on the part of doctors...Deathrates in maternity hospitals were around the 20% mark or worse not because of the general lack of understanding of complicated birth problems, but because doctors refused to wash their hands...it was a point of honour not to! It was considered cool to have loads of blood on your sleeves etc...This meant purpureal fever killed off huge numbers of the women they treated - and to be honest - you had a much better chance of surviving childbirth if you were poor and gave birth at home with just a midwife rather than in hospital or even in your posh home with the best physician on hand (who had just done an autopsy that morning and hadn't washed his hands on principle!).

Okay, it was unintentional I guess. but there is something very obscene about the way the two heroes who cottoned on to this problem - Wendell Holmes in Britain and above all the great Semmelweis in Vienna, were disbelieved and dissed and cold-shouldered...Even when he demonstrated beyond doubt that hand washing (and a drop of chrlorine) brought down maternal mortality
spectacularly, Semmelweis was ostracised and ignored...with other doctors making sneery comments to the effect that "doctors were gentlemen and gentleman's hands are always clean..." Hundreds of thousands of women died pointlessly to serve doctors' pride in the decades it took for the profession to grudgingly admit that Holmes and Semmelweis had been right...
The bastards wouldn't even believe their eyes - Semmelweis's wards: 1-2% mortality, their wards: 20%....
As a macabre and lethal tale of medical arrogance, this to me beats any occasional sensational murder spree by doctors for pleasure or professional instruction...

I think you will find that Judges and executioners were responsible for most deaths in days gone past.

If you want to be a doctor, start young.

You'll need AAA in Chemistry, Biology and Physics at A-Level. To get that, you'll need a strong performance in GCSE science. In other words, you have to have made up your mind by age 14. Many people do...I knew people at school who "knew" they wanted to be a doctor at that age.

But they didn't really "know". Socrates said that the "unexamined life is not worth living." Doctors choose their vocation before they have the critical faculties or the experience to make such a decision rationally.

In later life, this can have some rather peculiar psychological effects.

You'll need AAA in Chemistry, Biology and Physics at A-Level. To get that, you'll need a strong performance in GCSE science. In other words, you have to have made up your mind by age 14.

Because ... there's no point trying to get the best exam marks you can if you've not already decided to become a physician?

"Lefebure catches perfectly the sense of "otherness" of medical culture ? of not quite realising that what is being described is in itself macabre, unfeeling and distanced from their fellow human beings"

You cannot work any other way. You cannot become attached to human tissue and function as a doctor or researcher.
If you believe that you are working on a bunch of tumorous cells, you can dispassionately work on their biochemistry. If you think that you are working on a biopsied mass that is killing someone in the room down the hall it fucks up your mind.

My brother had to do a large number of dissections of cadavers (cadavers not dead peoples bodies). He managed to dissect 20 or so without throwing up, which was something of a record. Then he was extracting a nerve and in doing so cut into the base of a thumbnail. He immediately thought of how painful it is to be cut to the quick, realized at an emotional level that he was cutting up a person, then lost his lunch to a Technicolored yawn.

I find it hard to believe that these two Doctors had women and their unborn infants murdered to order. It is possible, but unlikely.

@Sarka - very interesting post!

Mr Wilson

the more important question to consider is not whether Hunter and Smellie were serial killers, but rather why so many in the medical profession seem to end up being able to be described in this way. What is it about some of those who join this profession, and who must have at one stage set out to help others, change so much that, over time, they start to kill and begin to take lives instead of saving them? Is this the fault of the individual medical professional (perhaps their motives were always murderous?), or rather the responsibility of the culture in which they are trained, and given power and responsibility?

Your logic is upside down. For this question to be important you would have to show that doctors are much more likely than the general population to be murderers. Many thousands of doctors have practiced in the UK in the last 200 years, of those less than ten (I believe) have been charged with committing murder during their duties. If you can get hold of the numbers I suspect that you'll fing that the rate of grievious assault (murder, attempted murder and major assault) is the same between the two groups.

Since doctors have knowledge of what can kill a person, and frequent opportunities to do so, doctors who do have a murderous inclination will be more likely to become serial killers than the lay murderer. It is simply a case of the circumstances driving the statistics, like the fact that prostitutes suffer assault much more often than the population at large. It's not necesarily that thugs hate prostitutes, but that women whose job requires them to be alone with strange men make very convenient targets for those inclined to committ assault.

Pffff. The average doctor has killed so many patients by the time he/she gets to the level of consultant, if a few more have been deliberately thrown on the pile it is probably barely here nor there.

I am, by profession, a statistician. If I were to draw any conclusion at all based merely on anecdotal evidence, I'd be laughed out of court. Does Mr Wilson have any statistical evidence that members of the medical profession are more likely to be serial killers than members of other professions? If he doesn't, what on earth is he on about?

Frankly, the more important question to consider is not whether Hunter and Smellie were serial killers, but rather why so many in the medical profession seem to end up being able to be described in this way

I don't think this is such a difficult question. i don't think it's even particular to the medical profession.

For those who have always been perverted, it's about means and opportunity (same as jobs which involve working with children attracting paedophiles). For those who just drive that road to hell forgetting what it's paved with, then medical is no different from any other profession - they just lose sight of the line between what harm to an individual is acceptable for the common good and what isn't.

Medics often stand in a position of power between life and death so of course it is going to appeal to serial killers, who can't resist playing with that power!! For example, the nurses who harm patients in order to then be a hero and save them - the so called 'angel of death' is a very distinct and well documented type of serial killer who of course needs access to the means of both endangering and saving a victim. That's why they wind up in the emergency services so often. In cases like Shipman's, it's a cold matter of being able to kill very easily without detection because of course in the medical profession you expect to lose patients, particularly if you're dealing with a lot of elderly folks.

This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted.

But the reality is that any professional culture that confers power and status on to its members, and then internally polices those who transgress it within that profession without reference to an outside body, is always ripe for manipulation and cover-up

I think you'll find there are rather a lot of external agencies monitoring doctors (and nurses) these days. From PCTs and appraisers through to GMC (which now has a majority law panel) through to the traditional law enforcement agencies (serial kiling is investigated by police, not the GMC)

Blair killed more than Shipman. It's not known if a General Lorry-drivers Council, staffed by laypeople, would prevent more serial killing by lorry drivers - maybe we should set one up and find out.

Ironically, what the Shipman case showed was the need to monitor suspicious deaths and death rates in the community systematically. The PCT had contracted Shipman to provide general medical services for his patients, and failed in their duties here (just as they have with the recent OOH scandals). Funnily enough, it was the medical profession at large, not the PCT that got it in the neck from the Shipman enquiry.

I find it hard to believe that these two Doctors had women and their unborn infants murdered to order. It is possible, but unlikely.

And that is the kind of deferential attitude that means when you do get a lethal medical professional they tend to get away with it. It?s why Shipman was only investigated superficially by the police when the first suspicions about him were raised. And probably why the killer locums was automatically protected by his governement last week when they accepted a lesser plea rather than have the matter investigated fully. People assume a doctor wouldn't harm someone through neglect or on purpose - even when the evidence says otherwise.

candleberry:

CaptainBillyBones,

...I am, by profession, a statistician.

I hear you lot bugger goats.

Don't knock it till you've tried it!

Horrible, and evidently plausible, as this theory is, it is depressing to think that these two distinguished gents probably killed vastly more women - bona fide patients - accidentally!

18th and 19th century obstetrics was a disaster area, above all because of simple lack of hygiene on the part of doctors...Deathrates in maternity hospitals were around the 20% mark or worse not because of the general lack of understanding of complicated birth problems, but because doctors refused to wash their hands

Excellent point!! Probably had no lack of cadavers from incompetence rather than murder

Although, the most common occupation for a serial killer, according to the FBI, is lorry driver.

Makes horrid sense in terms of opportunity. They can very quickly leave the towns behind so it may be a good while before the murders are connected if at all, nobody's going to be surprised if they're nomadic, they can take the evidence a nice long way away without anybody blinking an eyelid at where you're going at that time of night...

The McCarthy-ite procedures at the GMC since Shipman, now mean that many doctors are arraigned for limited note-keeping, whistleblowing on behalf of patients, having a surgical complication, or, doing unpopular research.

The politicians wish to abolish consultants and GP principals replacing them with a single "spine" of "health care practitioners" where authority replaces responsibility. It is the end of the NHS as we know it - killed by bureaucracy and reorganisation. It was the last trough in the public sector for the politicians to place their snouts in. Mass murder will be immensely difficult with this degree of surveillance. If it does exist, it will be a clinical manager that organises it.

As above, I'd like to see that statistics behind the statement about the apparent excess of serial killers in the medical profession.

One also wonders whether homeopaths have a similar problem, or if their serial killers are undetectable?

;)

Ilovedoggies

I think you will find that Judges and executioners were responsible for most deaths in days gone past.

I think you will find religions comfortably exceed even their total.

Keo2008

Apparently during "the Troubles" surgeons in Northern Ireland were envied by their colleagues in England because they had so many more interesting injuries to practice their skills on....

Now we send our A+E doctors in the Army to the US to practice dealing with gunshot wounds.

@Sarka

To be fair to the doctors, this was before germ theory, Koch and Lister, pasteur and jenner, and so none of it made sense, Semmelweis didn't really provide an answer as to why it worked either. Many great scientific discoveries have been met with laughter and derision, before being accepted, Newton, Darwin, Galileo...they all encountered similar things at one time or another. Spare a thought for poor mendel! no one even listened to him while he was alive.

People are intrinsically a little conservative and it just so happens that these doctors positons left more potential for harm through ignorance than that of the average astronomer or chemist in times gone by. At least now, in the age of evidence based medicine, they have gotten their acts together, and saved countless lives because of it.

CaptainBillyBones,

Don't knock it till you've tried it!

I'm in IT. The goats won't have me.

You have now made your level of knowledge of history so apparent that there is no point continuing this conversation any further with you.

Tell me Candleberry, exactly who do you think practiced medicine in rural, medievel Britain where doctors didn't exist? The village wisewoman (or witch as some preferred) was the person who delivered babies, treated ailments and tended the sick. Mostly it was ad hoc with knowledge of treatment and herbal medicines handed down by word of mouth. They were knowledgable with local herbs, a knowledge that we have lost and only now coming to understand that lose.

Modern medicine is pretty new and the bulk of it only in the second half of the last century. They were still using some pretty antiquated methods still in use in the forties and fifties.

sarka, fentonchem:
Good posts. A good friend of mine is a surgeon, and she has a decidedly dark sense of humour to cope.

It should also be remembered that the stigma attached to illegitimacy in 18C meant that unmarried pregnant women sometimes committed suicide if abandoned, or accidentally killed themselves through attempting (illegal) abortion. Eclampsia and hyperemesis could also kill pregnant women in those days. It strikes me as likely that Hunter and Smellie could have obtained numerous corpses from tragedies of these kinds.

bailliegillies:

Tell me Candleberry, exactly who do you think practiced medicine in rural, medievel Britain where doctors didn't exist? The village wisewoman (or witch as some preferred) was the person who delivered babies, treated ailments and tended the sick. Mostly it was ad hoc with knowledge of treatment and herbal medicines handed down by word of mouth. They were knowledgable with local herbs, a knowledge that we have lost and only now coming to understand that loss.

And as we know from comparable situations in the developing world, folk medicine of this kind by no means as reliable as modern medicine. Sentimentality about it because it was 'natural' does not disguise the fact it was, and is, often ineffective.

There are a lot of eejits posting on here who know bugger all about history or the medical profession.
Or for that matter the history of the medical profession.

First of all---`Doctors had to study at university and so they had to be wealthy`
University-yes
Wealthy-not necessarily--at least not in Scotland,which is where Hunter and Smellie came from.There is a long tradition there of bright lads being sponsored by the local lairds in there studies.The majority would have been from families in the professional classes or whose fathers were tradesmen.
And because many of them did not have private incomes it was very common for them to join the royal navy as surgeons to get a start in their professional lives.James Lind,for example.
What,you haven`t heard of him?
Why does that not surprise me?

`They lived in unenlightened times.`
Oh no they didn`t.
They were part of the Scottish Enlightenmen--a movement which was investigating the furthest reaches of existing science and philosophy at a time when the english were still trying to figure out how to wipe their arses.

Puerperal fever.
It certainly killed a lot of women unnecessarily.But it wasn`t Semmelweiss or Holmes who first figured it out.Fifty years before them,in 1795, Dr Alexander Gordon in Aberdeen published a paper stating unequivocally that it was passed on by doctors and midwives and how to prevent it.
For his pains he was virulently abused by female midwives.
But by the 1840`s it was by and large accepted by the medical profession in Britain.Most specifically by James Young Simpson in the Edinburgh hospital that he managed from 1840 onwards and where he lectured on the critical importance of hygiene and of doctors washing their hands between patients.
Simpsons father was a baker,by the way.So he could hardly be described as wealthy,could he.

And just remember when this was supposed to have taken place.The middle of the eighteenth century.There were many things that would have killed you then that you would survive today.
To take one example.Compound fractures.That`s where the broken bone protrudes through the skin.
In 2010 it`s unpleasant but you get it fixed.In 1750 you would die.

And remember too that this was the era of Hogarth.Take a look at`Gin Lane` and ask yourself if it was really so unlikely that in a city the size of London the bodies of three or four pregnant women could end up on the dissection tables each year.

The two Hunters,William and John,and William Smellie were true pioneers in medicine and anatomy,constantly fighting against the ignorance and prejudices of their times.Everyone who finds themselves needing medical care today owes them a debt of gratitude.

AllyF
Yes indeed, some stories of medics are pretty frightening. A few years back the Observer or Times ran a long article by a junior doctor about medical...uh...mistakes and problems. The two anecdotes that stuck in my brain were a) a lengthy one involving a drunk orthopedic surgeon lurching round the theatre with a chainsaw while his second in command had to jump on his back to prevent him using it on the patient ("fortunately already anaesthetised" (sic)), and b) his report that in his London hospital there was a surgeon known to all as "007" (i.e. "license to kill"),.

Skipissatan.
Yes of course you are right that neither Holmes nor Semmelweis had an adequate explanatory theory, but I don't think that is entirely an excuse... Semmelweis's results after all were indisputably spectacular, and his forensic logic impeccable (even without theoretical explanation...)...e.g. he noted the extremely high deathrate in wards attended regularly by doctors, and the comparatively low level in wards attended only by midwives...difference? among other things, crucially, was the fact that midwives never did autopsies...

Practically, his results were so impressive that in an era when medicine was so wildly ungrounded in solid science that rival fundamental theories were two a penny, and results of a mere trial-and-error kind usually mattered more to practising physicians than theoretical disagreements, his actual persecution by other doctors (it must be stressed that this was quite unusually harsh) can only be seriously explained by their sense of offense going beyond mere scientific disagreement. I.e. he was attributing a problem specifically to their behaviour; he was pointing our the better results of "despised" midwives.... Charitably, one might speculate that doctors were also resistant to the idea that they might be causing such extraordinary harm...

I am a great admirer of science, including medicine since it got its scientific act together from the earlier 20th century, but as a historian I am also fascinated at episodes when one can see people getting things distorted not just out of ignorance, but with a slant of conscious or unconscious "corporate" :interest. Not just obvious instances like Darwin's theories upsetting religious ideas (so the religious had an "interest" in combatting them), but even e.g. Darwin's own occasionally distortion of common sense. One instance is his theorisation that the characteristics of females are all inherited through the female line. Of course, he could theorise thus because he did not have genetic theory available to him (that of course mainly backed him up massively when it emerged). But the reason he theorised thus came from a very strong (characteristic for the period) urge to preserve the idea of the inferiority of the female, which would have been complicated and upset by the idea of characteristics inherited across the sexes...You can see the "urge" precisely because even without a theory available, he was - unusually for him - flying in the face of commonsense non-theoretical observation...Daughters frequently inherit physical characteristics from fathers - and sons from mothers, that is entirely obvious - When every novelist of the period knew that, it was funny that Darwin ignored it...
I would contend that it was for similar status reasons, and not just theoretical conservatism, that so many doctors dissed Semmelweis despite his excellent practical results...

Yay! for Locheil

Anybody know what the feck this article is actually about? If the author is frightened of doctors he must have "breeks full" moment when he sees a white van.

There have over the last couple of hundred years been a hell of a lot of doctors. That one or two were a bit mad is hardly surprising just by dint of sheer weight of numbers. As to black humour - I think that sort of goes with the territory. It is a survival mechanism.

Locheil,
Interesting stuff on Britain and hygiene...
I'll admit I know more about Semmelweis (a hero of mine), and the Central European doctors were maybe more resistant than the British...

O course doctors were not always from affluent families, especially not in Scotland which as a society was a load more meritocratic than England.
...but I'd diagnose as historian that precisely because their social status was contested - inferior to lawyers, for example, especially in England - they developed a very neurotically defensive view of their own status and "gentility"....

But otherwise you just seem to be saying that because these two-three doctors were great chaps in the history of medicine, they could not have been guilty of criminal activities...

That seems just an act of faith... My own guess would be that they did not order "murders" but ordered bodies and didn't ask too many questions about how the bodies came to be bodies...Procuring bodies was a dodgy and socially problematic thing altogether in those days, so the sort of people who got them for you were maybe dodgy too.

Maybe they comforted themselves in much the same way as you do....thinking "well of course, there's nothing odd about us getting the bodies we want, lots of people are dying in poverty..."

Doesn't affect the value of the science, anyway...Only the myth of the saintly humanity of scientists, which is surely in most areas regarded with scepticism anyway. Some great scientists were humane, others ruthless and corner-cutting...

And as we know from comparable situations in the developing world, folk medicine of this kind by no means as reliable as modern medicine. Sentimentality about it because it was 'natural' does not disguise the fact it was, and is, often ineffective.

@silverwhistle

I didn't say it was reliable, just that it was practiced by mainly women in their own communities. Given the appalling conditions and lack of knowledge that they worked under they appear to have done a remarkable job. So let's not look down on them too much as the modern medical profession can hardly claim to have been reliable until the second half of the twentieth century, when modern technology and medicines came to their aid.

When was it that they learnt to wash their hands and other matters of basic hygeine. For the kind of medicine these women practice read the life of Mary Seacole, who by rights should have equal place alongside Florence Nightingale for her work in the Crimea.

Silverwhistle
I must admit that I thought of Eclampsia as the major source of pregnant (dead) women, especially as low levels of vitamin D and low selenium are risk factors.
I found this:-

Smellie?s A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgment, of the practice of midwifery (London, 1754) enlisted the Dutch artist, Jan van Rymsdyk (ca. 1750-1789), to create a series of arresting visual images that could show both these internal processes and the female body as it would be seen during birth from the outside.

"dissection had revealed just how much rickets, a disease of the bones caused by lack of sunlight, could distort a woman?s pelvic region"

http://ansel.library.northwestern.edu/ImageServer/index.jsp?filename=/dimages/public/images/block-massey/smellie_15-final.jp2&title=View+of+infants+head+crowning+during+normal+birth

A whole collection of Smellie?s and Jan van Rymsdyk work is here:-

http://anatomyofgender.northwestern.edu/massey01.html