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. The clinic pioneered artificial insemination using donor sperm for women whose husbands may have been infertile. The clinic helped women conceive 1,500 babies, nicknamed the 'Barton Brood', although the exact records appear to have been destroyed in 1963 owing to the social taboos and lack of regulation surrounding the subject.

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. 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. 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.

While there had been successful artificial insemination births documented during the 19th century, the practice was not widely accepted as ethical in Britain, even when used for the breeding of farm animals. After publishing a paper about their work in the British Medical Journal, the Archbishop of Canterbury labelled it 'the work of Beelzebub'. 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'.

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Wikipedia