ABSTRACT
Burton suggests here that it was an easy task to find the ancient texts Smellie used for his history of medicine and, in his more detailed demolition of Smellie later in the book, alleged that most of the Hippocratic material came from Maurice de la Corde’s commentary on the Hippocratic Diseases of Women 1. He wrote, ‘the chief of what you give us, as taken from Hippocrates, is to be found in him, except the very first Part, which is taken from Le Clerc’, reiterating that ‘there is no Difficulty to extract all you have said, as taken from Hippocrates, out of that single volume of Spachius’.2 I disagree. The Hippocratic extracts in Smellie’s work depend neither on Burnet’s Hippocrates Contractus nor on Le Clerc’s summaries of Hippocratic texts, but nor do they derive from Spach. Burton’s own detailed account of which
1 John Burton, A Letter to William Smellie, MD, Containing critical and practical remarks upon his treatise on the theory and practice of Midwifery. Wherein the various gross mistakes and dangerous methods of practice mentioned and recommended by that writer, are fully demonstrated (London, 1753), p. iv. Note that Burton implies Guillemeau is included in the Spach collection; this is not, in fact, the case. His work was published not in 1582, but in 1609, 12 years after the final edition of the Gynaeciorum libri.
