Mary Barton (obstetrician)

Mary Barton founded a fertility clinic in Portland Place, London and later in Wimpole Street London with her husband Bertold Wiesner in the late 1930s and it did not close until 1967. It is assumed that all records were destroyed when the practice closed.^[1][2] The clinic pioneered artificial insemination using donor sperm for women whose husbands may have been infertile. The clinic helped women conceive 1,500 babies,^[1] nicknamed the 'Barton Brood',^[3] although the exact records appear to have been destroyed in 1963 owing to the social taboos and lack of regulation surrounding the subject.^[4]

Early life

Mary Barton's motivation to work in the area of infertility came from time spent in India as a medical missionary where she witnessed the way in which women would be punished or even killed for being childless. She was the daughter of several generations of surgeons and doctors, born in Lowestoft, Suffolk.

Dr Douglas Barton, was Mary Barton's first husband, based in Dera Ismail Khan and he practised, with her, all around India’s North-west frontier working for a Missionary Hospital.^[3] At the time, it was 'taboo' to suggest that it might be the husband, and not the wife, who was infertile- not only on the Indian sub continent but also in the UK.^[3] Barton understood that both men and women could be infertile .She returned to London and established a fertility practice, pioneering AID for women who were unable to conceive a child with their husband/partner.

Her divorce from her first husband was in 1939. Dr Mary Barton married physiologist Bertold Paul Wiesner in 1943. They had a son, Jonathan Wiesner.

The Barton Clinic

While there had been successful artificial insemination births documented during the 19th century,^[3] the practice was not widely accepted as ethical in Britain, even when used for the breeding of farm animals.^[3] After publishing a paper about their work in the British Medical Journal, the Archbishop of Canterbury labelled it 'the work of Beelzebub'.^[3] Although people refer to the 'Barton Clinic’ Dr Mary Barton did not have a ‘clinic’ as such, but practised from a single consulting room, plus an office for her medical secretary, Miss Gwen Jenkins who worked with Mary Barton for some 30 years.

Bertold Wiesner had his own consulting room. Dr Mary Barton also worked one day a week (probably for the newly formed National Health Service) at the Royal Free Hospital. It is likely that this was in a ‘clinic' shared with colleagues.

In a context of social taboo, Dr Mary Barton insisted on 'total secrecy' about the service she offered, telling the parents they should 'never let their children find out how they had been conceived or identify the donors'.^[3]

Some clients would pay a significant sum of money, meaning many of their clients were middle-income.^[2] Mary Barton also claimed to have helped many of the 'upper classes' and ‘peers of the realm’.^[2] In a paper in the British Medical Journal, Barton and fellow authors Kenneth Walker and Wiesner explained that they used a 'small panel of donors', as sperm donors, who in reality were associates they considered of 'intelligent stock'.^[1][2][5] However, it is roughly estimated that hundreds of the babies were conceived using sperm from Bertold Wiesner himself.^[1] It is not clear if Mary Barton knew that so much of the sperm being used was from her husband or associates such as neuroscientist Derek Richter (who fathered more than a hundred babies), but it is unlikely she would not have suspected this was the case, as she kept the records of donor fathers with code names. Documentary filmmaker Barry Stevens stated 'it's possible he Bertold Wiesner didn't tell his wife and she believed the donations were coming from a lot of different men'.^[3] Regardless, as a scientist specialising in fertility (among other areas) Bertold Wiesner would have been aware that there were some risks created by his fathering so many children. The practice was medically ground-breaking and unregulated at the time.

Legacy

The clinic was one of the first of its kind to offer artificial insemination. Mary Barton stated she only took people who were perceived to be 'above average' and from 'intelligent stock'.

"I matched race, colouring and stature and all donors were drawn from intelligent stock. I wouldn’t take a donor unless he was, if anything, a little above average. If you are going to do it [create a child] deliberately, you have got to put the standards rather higher than normal." Some commentators have argued that her actions were 'well-meaning', as there was a 'stigma of infertility and AID at the time',^[3]

The clinic helped women conceive an unknown number of babies, but possibly as many as 1,500, the majority of whom came from perhaps only a few progenitors.^[1]

Dr Mary Barton and Bertold Wiesner could not have known of the implications of contemporary research into the structure of DNA, and likely believed that after the destruction of the records, their actions would be untraceable.

References