Roy Meadow

Sir Samuel Roy Meadow (born 9 June 1933) is a British retired paediatrician infamous for facilitating several wrongful convictions of mothers for murdering their babies.

In 1961, Meadow married Gillian Maclennan, daughter of Sir Ian Maclennan, the British ambassador to Ireland.

He was awarded the Donald Paterson prize of the British Paediatric Association in 1968 for a study of the effects on parents of having a child in hospital.

The couple had two children, Julian and Anna, before divorcing in 1974.

Four years later he married his second wife, Marianne Jane Harvey.

In 1977, he published an academic paper describing a phenomenon dubbed Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP).

In 1977, in The Lancet medical journal, Meadow published the theory which was to make him famous.

Sufferers of his postulated Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy or MSbP (a name coined by Meadow himself) harm or fake symptoms of illness in persons under their care (usually their own children) in order to gain the attention and sympathy of medical personnel.

This claim was based upon the extraordinary behaviour of two mothers: one had (Meadow claimed) poisoned her toddler with excessive quantities of salt.

The other had introduced her own blood into her baby's urine sample.

Although it was initially regarded with scepticism, MSbP soon gained a following amongst doctors and social workers.

In 1980 he was awarded a professorial chair in paediatrics at St James's University Hospital, Leeds, and in 1998, he was knighted for services to child health.

Meadow was appointed professor of paediatrics and child health at the University of Leeds in 1980, based at St James's University Hospital, having previously been a Senior Lecturer in the same department.

In 1993, Meadow gave expert testimony at the trial of Beverley Allitt, a paediatric nurse accused (and later found guilty) of murdering several of her patients.

Meadow went on to testify in many other trials, many of which concerned cases previously diagnosed as cot death or sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Meadow was convinced that many apparent cot deaths were the result of physical abuse.

Families that had suffered more than one cot death were to attract particular attention: "There is no evidence that cot deaths runs in families", said Meadow, "but there is plenty of evidence that child abuse does".

His rule of thumb was that "unless proven otherwise, one cot death is tragic, two is suspicious and three is murder".

Although this dictum is believed not to have originated from Meadow's own lips, it has become almost universally known as Meadow's law.

His work became controversial, particularly arising from the consequences of a belief he stated in his 1997 book ABC of Child Abuse that, in a single family, "one sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proved otherwise".

This became known as "Meadow's law" and was influential in the thinking of UK social workers and child protection agencies, such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Meadow's reputation was severely damaged after his appearances as an expert witness for the prosecution in several trials played a crucial part in wrongful convictions for murder.

Despite having fundamental misunderstandings of statistics he presented himself as an expert in the field.

Meadow's miscalculations significantly contributed towards the wrongful imprisonment of innocent mothers whom he branded murderers.

He retired with the title Emeritus Professor in 1998.

The British General Medical Council (GMC) struck him from the British Medical Register after he was found to have offered erroneous and misleading evidence in the 1999 trial of Sally Clark, who was wrongly convicted of the murder of her two baby sons.

This trend was to reach its apogee in 1999 when solicitor Sally Clark was tried for allegedly murdering her two babies.

Her elder son Christopher had died at the age of 11 weeks, and her younger son Harry at 8 weeks.

Medical opinion was divided on the cause of death, and several leading paediatricians testified that the deaths were probably natural.

Clark's conviction was overturned in 2003 but she never recovered from the experience, and died in 2007 from acute alcohol poisoning.

Clark's father, Frank Lockyer, complained to the GMC, alleging serious professional misconduct on the part of Meadow.

The GMC concluded in July 2005 that Meadow was guilty, but he appealed to the High Court, which in February 2006 ruled in his favour.

The GMC appealed to the Court of Appeal, but in October 2006, by a majority decision, the court upheld the ruling that Meadow was not guilty of the GMC's charge.

The reason was that his behaviour in court did not impact his care for his own patients.

Meadow was born in Wigan, Lancashire, the son of Samuel and Doris Meadow.

He studied medicine at Worcester College, Oxford, and later practised as a GP in Banbury, Oxfordshire.

Throughout his early years in medicine, Meadow was a devoted admirer of Anna Freud (daughter of Sigmund Freud), whose lectures he would often attend.

Speaking in later life, he said: "I was, as a junior, brought up by Anna Freud, who was a great figure in child psychology, and I used to sit at her feet at Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead. She used to teach us that a child needs mothering and not a mother."

There is some controversy over these claims.

According to the London Evening Standard, representatives of the Anna Freud Centre claimed to have no record of him completing a formal training there and repudiated his description of her philosophy.