Mr. Hutchinson, of the London Hospital, has stated, in a
letter to the Daily News of this day week, that he should not have thought it right,—whether he had had a class to impress the lesson upon, or not,—to have given a patient afflicted with such a plague of boils as he described in the passage quoted by us last week from his lecture, the arsenical medicine which cured him, without first allowing him to get accustomed to the life in hospital and his treatment there, and seeing how the disease from which he was suffering was affected by the new conditions. This is satisfactory ; but if Mr. Hutchinson has been misunder- stood, he has only himself to thank for that misunderstanding. Nothing could be more explicit than the language of his address, as published in the British Medical Jouraca, of which, as it is reported in the first person, the proofs had, we should suppose, been revised by himself. "He [the patient] was in a miserable condition, from pain and irritation. The eruption had been out about ten days, and it affected the mucus mem- brane of his mouth, as well as the skin. You will remember that we kept him in bed a few days before we used the magician's wand, in order that all might see that there was no natural tendency to amelioration." (The italics are ours.) That, surely, was explicit enough. Mr. Hutchinson now says that it was a policy pursued primarily for the benefit of the patient, and not for the benefit of the students. Why, then, did he do himself the gross injustice of suggesting just the opposite, both to his class and to the public ? If he had wished to be misunderstood, he could hardly have managed it better.
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