Not a defence
Sir: Theodore Dalrymple’s good sense seems to have deserted him in glossing over the seriousness of the charges against Professors Meadow and Southall (‘In defence of David Southall’, 6 September). He mischievously suggests that the sole complaint against Professor Meadow is that he deployed a misleading statistic in the trial that led to Sally Clark’s conviction and life sentence for murdering her two sons. But his authority and reputation as an expert in such cases was based on a theory that was built on a circular argument.
Dr Dalrymple’s similarly benign view of Professor Southall is at odds with the verdict of the General Medical Council (‘your conduct is so serious it is fundamentally incompatible with your continuing to be a registered medical practitioner’) after hearing, inter alia, of his wrongfully accusing a mother of murdering her son by asphyxiating him with his belt. Dr Dalrymple might usefully have drawn attention to the hazards of the professor’s favoured diagnosis of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy whose criteria are so elastic they could apply to most medical conditions whose explanation is not clear.
Over the last decade the medical advocacy of the contentious theories of Meadow and Southall has resulted in a systematic miscarriage of justice in the Family and Criminal Courts without precedent in British legal history. That does not seem a cause worth defending when with a little diligent research Dr Dalrymple could have heard for himself the stories of any number of parents who have been robbed of their families and good name as a result of these theories.
James LeFanu
London SW4
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