Dr. Southwood Smith


Book Description




Dr Southwood Smith


Book Description




Dr. Southwood Smith: A Retrospect (Illustrated Edition)


Book Description

Thomas Southwood Smith (1788-1851) was an English physician and sanitary reformer. He entered the University of Edinburgh in October 1812, his first wife, Anne, with whom he had two daughters, having died that year. In June 1813 he began a course of fortnightly evening lectures on universal restoration which were published in 1816, earning him a literary reputation. He took his MD degree in 1816 and began practice in Yeovil, Somerset, then in 1820 moved to London. In 1824 Smith was appointed physician to the London Fever Hospital and began to write papers on public health. His post gave him the opportunity to study diseases of poverty and in the late 1830s he was one of the first doctors brought in to report to the Poor Law Commission. In 1842 he was one of the founders of an early housing association, the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, and from 1848-54 worked closely with Edwin Chadwick at the Central Board of Health. His reports on quarantine, cholera and yellow fever, and on the results of sanitary improvement, were of international importance, and his earlier work A Treatise on Fever (1830) became a standard authority on the subject. He had a son by his second wife Mary from whom he had separated by the late 1830s, living for the rest of his life with the artist Margaret Gillies.This illustrated retrospective written by his granddaughter Gertrude was published in 1898.







The Doctor Dissected


Book Description

A series of bizarre disappearances filled the citizens of early nineteenth-century Scotland with terror. When the perpetrators were finally apprehended in 1828, their motive roiled the nation: William Burke and William Hare had murdered for profit. The cadavers supplied a ready payout, courtesy of Dr. Robert Knox, who was desperate for anatomical subjects. Nearly two hundred years later, these scandalous murders continue to fire imagination in Scotland and beyond. From the start, the sensational events provoked artists and writers. While Sir Walter Scott resisted public comment, his correspondence gives his trenchant private opinion and shows him working busily behind the scenes and against the doctor. Many more mined the news outright. Serial novelist David Pae exploited the disturbance to lobby for religious belief in an increasingly secular world. A subsequent generation resurrected the grisly drama as fodder for the Victorian gothic-the murders figure prominently in Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Body Snatcher" and, more obliquely, in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The twentieth century saw the specters of Burke and Hare emerge in James Bridie's play The Anatomist, Hollywood horror films, television programs like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Frankensteinian retellings from Alasdair Gray. In this century, the story has been picked up by Smallville and Doctor Who. Recent allusions and reenactments range from the somber-in popular detective fiction by Ian Rankin-to the dark, camp comedy of Fringe Festival performances and the slapstick of John Landis's Burke and Hare. Featuring over thirty images and canvassing a wide range of media-from contemporary newspaper accounts and private correspondence to Japanese comic books and videogames-The Doctor Dissected analyzes the afterlife of this national trauma and considers its singular place in Scottish history.




Men of the Time


Book Description










The London Magazine


Book Description