The letters of Mr. Alexander Fiddes, F.R.C.S., Edin. considered and refuted, his misrepresentations exposed, his calumnies and innuendoes set in the light of truth, his various statements in the press and otherwise weighed in the balance and found wanting / by Lewis Quier Bowerbank ; together with documentary letters and papers, tending to expose a professional conspiracy, and to afford the public in the colonies, and in Great Britain, correct judgment as to the controversy now existing on hospital matters.
- Bowerbank, Lewis Q.
- Date:
- 1865
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The letters of Mr. Alexander Fiddes, F.R.C.S., Edin. considered and refuted, his misrepresentations exposed, his calumnies and innuendoes set in the light of truth, his various statements in the press and otherwise weighed in the balance and found wanting / by Lewis Quier Bowerbank ; together with documentary letters and papers, tending to expose a professional conspiracy, and to afford the public in the colonies, and in Great Britain, correct judgment as to the controversy now existing on hospital matters. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.
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![An Editoviul from the Medical Times and Grazette, of tlie 25th March, ]865, entitled Colonial Medical Ethics. We have received from the Island of Jamaica, several newspa- pers containing portions of the evidence ^iven at an Inquest held on a man who died at the Puhlic Hospital, after an operation for there- inSval of a l)roken piece of catiieter from the urethra. As far as we can g-atlier from the imperfect information which has reached us, the following were the principal points in the case :—The deceased, Eichard Bailey, age 66, was admitted a patient of the Hospital, on January 11, on account of difficulty in passing water. Mr. Fiddes, who was at that time one of the Surgeons to the Institution, found that he was labouring under an impervious condition of the prepuce. This he relieved by a cutting operation on January 16. He then found that the glans penis had been destroyed by previous disease. On January 20 Mr. Fiddes retired from the office of Surgeon to the Hospital, and the Medical and Suvgical management of the Institu- tion was undertaken by Dr. Bowerbauk and Dr. Anderson. This last named gentleman took charge of Bailey, and, as w'e suppose, in consequence of what appeared to him the occluded state of the ure- thra, on January 27 ho introduced a No. 2 catheter, and tied it in the bladder. From an accident, stated by one of the patients to have been caused by the man getting out of bed, and hitching the instru- ment in the iron bedstead—it broke, and a portion six and a-half inches long was left in the urethra. The removal of the retained piece by urethral forceps does not seem to have been attempted. Drs. Bowerbauk and Anderson stated that there was no such instru- ment in the Hospital. Dr. Field, who, we believe, is the resident medical Officer, managed, however, to introduce an instrument by the side of the broken portion into the man's bladder. The foreign body remained in the urethra for nine days. It was then extracted by dividing the posterior portion of the canal. The man sank after the operation, and at the post-mortem examination it was found that the kidneys were in an advanced state of disease—wasted, con- tracted, and hardened—^and tliat the coats of the bladder were great- ly thickened. The integuments of the scrotum wei-e distended with eero-purulent effusion, and the wound in the urethra appeared sloughy and unhealthy. We believe that had such an unfortunate case happened in any other part of the civilized word, or even in Jamaica at any other time, it would not have been made the subject of a legal inquiry. Whatever may be said about its Surgical management, it was clear- ly a case which presented no ordinary difficulties, and the practice pursued by the Surgeons in charge of it was, by every rule of Medi- cal ethics, entitled to at least the fair and charitable construction of their Professionol brethren. We suppose that nobody doubts that Messrs. Anderson and Bowerbauk acted to the best of their judg- ment and skill, and if every Medical man who meets with an un- lucky case, were liable to be summoned before a coroner's jury, o\\](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21297733_0021.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
