Three of the 18th Century’s most celebrated anatomists may have murdered scores of women, reports the Observer. Brothers John and William Hunter, plus obstetrician William Smellie, have been accused of ‘burking’ – killing in order to procure a body for dissection – in a new study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

John Hunter was a pioneer of countless surgical techniques and an early champion of evidence-based medicine. He’s perhaps the only commoner in London to boast three public monuments (in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Tooting and Leicester Square), and the founder of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. His brother, William, was also a noted London surgeon and founding father of obstetrical techniques. (For my map of Hunterian London, see here.) Smellie, meanwhile, is often described as the founder of midwifery.

The study amasses plenty of circumstantial evidence to implicate the anatomists in murder. William Hunter and Smellie would compete to master caesarian section, often on recently deceased mothers. But the supply of suitable bodies could not have been met by natural death alone, claim the authors. The surgeons undoubtedly turned to murder (probably committed by John Hunter and other proxies) to procure their subjects. The study estimates a ‘death total greater than the combined murders committed by Burke and Hare and Jack the Ripper’.

The findings won’t shock anyone who’s read The Knife Man, an excellent biography of John Hunter by Wendy Moore. The Hunters were notorious for their seemingly inexhaustible supply of cadavers at William’s school in Covent Garden. While teaching hospitals were allocated just a handful of bodies (former criminals) a year, the Hunters could muster a not-so-fresh corpse almost daily. The usual explanation is grave robbery. The new implication is much darker.