William Smellie 1697-1763
William SMELLIE 1697-1763
Biographical Note
Smellie was born at Lesmahagow, Lanarkshire, on 5 February 1697, the son of Archibald Smellie and Sara Kennedy. After attending grammar school in Lanark he became apprenticed to a Lanark apothecary in 1714 and received some medical training. In 1720 and 1721 he acted as a naval surgeon, and set up as an independent apothecary in Lanark in 1722. Married in 1724, he gained experience as a physician, and in 1733 became a member of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. He moved to London in 1739, studied for a short time in Paris and over the years in the capital built up a high reputation as a teacher and practitioner in obstetrics. As a man-midwife he concentrated on poorer patients, whereas his erstwhile pupil William Hunter became wealthy through attending the richer members of society. Smellie became an MD of Glasgow University in 1745. In 1752 he published the first volume of his highly important Treatise of the Theory and Practice of Midwifery, which ultimately was completed in three volumes; and in 1754 he issued his influential A Sett of Anatomical Tables. He retired to Lanark in 1759, dying there four years later, on 5 March 1763.
Books
Smellie left his collection of books to the grammar school of Lanark and provided money for its accommodation and, if any funds remained, its augmentation. Medical material, especially items dealing with obstetrics, was predominant. His will became operative in 1769, after the death of his wife. Unfortunately, over the centuries, the library was much neglected and there were many losses and much damage to remaining volumes. After 1930, attention was again given to it, and the extant books, by now just over 400 volumes, were in 1934 transferred to the Lindsay Institute in Lanark, which houses the central public library in the town. Much restoration work was undertaken in the years immediately before the Second World War. The collection remains at the Institute, held in a special bookcase, separate from other library material. The medical items, numbering some 177 volumes, were described and listed in an article which appeared in 1952. Some of Smellie’s own works represented are, however, not his own copies. The other volumes in the Smellie collection are mainly of classical authors, historical works and English literature, including the Strawberry-Hill edition of the Odes of Thomas Gray, 1757. There are also volumes of the Philosophical Transactions and some other periodical runs.
Sources
- Bunch, Antonia J., Hospital and Medical Libraries in Scotland: an Historical and Sociological Study (Glasgow: Scottish Library Association. 1975).
- Peel, John ‘Smellie, William (1697-1763), man-midwife’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
- Tait, Haldane P. and Wallace, Archibald T., ‘Dr William Smellie and his Library at Lanark, Scotland’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 26 (1952), 403-421.
- Information from Murray Simpson.