The medical world has reason to be proud of one
of its members who died this week, as the consequence of a really heroic act performed in the course of his professional duty. Dr. Samuel Rabbeth, a young man of only twenty-seven years, senior resident medical officer of the Royal Free Hospital, Gray's Inn Road, found, on Friday fortnight, that a child of four years of age, on whom tracheotomy had been performed to relieve the breathing, must die of diphtheria unless the suffo- cating membrane were sucked away through the tube. And he risked and lost his own life through diphtheria in the attempt to save the child's, which he did not succeed in saving after all. The risk was not one which professional etiquette in any way required him to run, but he ran it in the enthusiasm of his love of service, and he ought to be remembered as one of the noblest of the martyrs of duty.
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