Medical Bulletins

     We publish elsewhere a clipping from the British Medical Journal referring to some criticisms by Sir Dyce Duckworth, contained in a letter to the London Spectator, upon the medical bulletins issued by the attendants on President McKinley. Sir Dyce Duckworth shows plainly that it is easy to criticise from a distance, and also that he has little appreciation of the extreme tension of public feeling and anxiety in this country while the President was lying ill. This was not a question merely of taste. Details from the sick chamber are not always pleasant reading, and when published in the daily press in all their baldness they are likely somewhat to offend the sensibilities of some people. In a case such as the President’s, however, there was every reason why a full and frank statement of [620][621] the symptoms and treatment should be given to the public. To have acted otherwise would have been to expose themselves to well merited criticism, and the physicians and surgeons in the case showed their good judgment in nothing more than when they took the public into their confidence.