Thomas Southwood Smith

Smith was born at Martock, Somerset, into a strict Baptist family, his parents being William Smith and Caroline Southwood. In 1802 he won a scholarship These associations and friendships drew him into the centre of 19th Century reform. ==Medical man==

Smith entered the University of Edinburgh in October 1812, and in November took over the Unitarian congregation meeting in Skinners' Hall, Canongate, which had stayed together without a minister since the death in 1795 of James Purves; he became known as a powerful preacher and raised the attendance sharply. In June 1813 he began a course of fortnightly evening lectures on universal restoration; these were published in 1816 and made him a literary reputation. Also in 1813 he founded the Scottish Unitarian Association, with James Yates, which brought Smith into contact with the Unitarian Lady Gillies and her nieces Mary and Margaret Gillies who would play a large part in his later life. In 1816 he took his M.D. degree, and began to practice at Yeovil, Somerset, also becoming minister at a chapel in that town, but moved in 1820 to London, devoting himself mainly to medicine. ==Public health==

In 1824 Smith was appointed physician to the London Fever Hospital.8 The following year he began to write papers on public health. His post gave him the opportunity to study diseases of poverty. In the late 1830s, with Neil Arnott and James Phillips Kay, 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. Smith was a close ally on public health matters with Edwin Chadwick, and like him supported the miasma theory. From 1848 to 1854 they worked closely together at the General Board of Health. Smith was frequently consulted in fever epidemics and on sanitary matters by public authorities. His reports on quarantine (1845), cholera (1850), yellow fever (1852), and on the results of sanitary improvement (1854) were of international importance. ==Bentham dissection==

Southwood Smith was a close friend of Jeremy Bentham and his secretary Edwin Chadwick. On 8 June 1832, two days after his death, invitations were distributed to a select group of friends, and on the following day at 3 p.m., before the dissection, Southwood Smith delivered a lengthy oration over Bentham's remains in the Webb Street School of Anatomy & Medicine in Southwark, London. In the oration Smith argued that:"If, by any appropriation of the dead, I can promote the happiness of the living, then it is my duty to conquer the reluctance I may feel to such a disposition of the dead, however well-founded or strong that reluctance may be". Afterward, the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the "Auto-icon", with the skeleton padded out with hay and dressed in Bentham's clothes. From 1833 it stood in Southwood Smith's Finsbury Square consulting rooms until he abandoned private practice in the winter of 1849-50 when it was moved to 36 Percy Street, Margaret Gillies' studio, who made studies of it. In March 1850 Southwood Smith offered the auto-icon to Henry Brougham who readily accepted it for UCL. Smith's lobbying helped lead to the 1832 Anatomy Act, the legislation which allowed the state to seize unclaimed corpses from workhouses and sell them to surgical schools. While this act is credited with ending the practice of grave robbery, it has also been condemned as discriminatory against the poor. ==Works==

In 1830 Smith published A Treatise on Fever, which became a standard authority on the subject. In this book he established a direct connection between the impoverishment of the poor and epidemic fever. The underlying theory opposed contagion as a mechanism of spread of disease, and postulated no pathogen that was airborne; it argued that the exclusion of "pure air" could suffice to create mortal disease. ==Family==

Smith married twice, firstly in 1808, to Anne Read, the daughter of a prominent Bristol tradesman. Anne died of fever four years later, at age 24, leaving Smith a widower with two young daughters, Caroline and Emily. His second marriage was to Mary, daughter of John Christie of Hackney, and they had three children, Along with his son Herman and daughter Emily they visited Wisbech in June 1836 and dined with Caroline and the actor William Macready, who was appearing as Hamlet in the Georgian Angles Theatre owned by James and Caroline. They also owned a school they built in front of the theatre. Following his son-in-law James Hill's second bankruptcy in 1840, his three-year-old granddaughter Gertrude Hill (1837–1923) came to live with him. In the 1861 census the household lived at Heath House, Weybridge and consisted of Thomas Smith 72, Mary Gillies 62, Margaret Gillies 56, his son Herman Smith 40, wine merchant, his granddaughter Gertrude Hill, 23 lady, and a cook and a housemaid. ==Later life==

In his 70th year Smith travelled abroad for the first time to Milan, Italy to examine the irrigation works. Two years later, on a visit to his daughter Emily in Florence, he caught a chill and died there on 10 December 1861. He is interred there in the English Cemetery of Florence; his tombstone, an obelisk with a cameo portrait, was sculpted by Joel Tanner Hart. His daughter Emily, who died in 1872, is buried beside him. ==Further reading==