THE ALLEGATIONS in the Medical Press that a man who
murdered three women was reprieved each time have had a lot of publicity, but so far as I can see there is no truth in them whatever. One man was three times convicted of manslaughter, but that is not, apparently, what the Medical Press has in mind. When asked by the Daily Herald, the Editor of the Medical Press, Sir Cecil Wakeley, refused to give the name of the man in question. The only sensible reason for the refusal that I can think of is that he does not know it. 'For our part,' his journal says, 'we cannot help regarding two of these unfortunate victims as well as the second child murdered by Straffen as sacrifices to psychological theories.' At his first trial Straffen was found unfit to plead, i.e. he was found hopelessly insane; it is a little hard to see what this has to do with 'psychological theories'— unless the Medical Press thinks madness is some- thing that has been thought up by the psychiatrists. The paper has also got Straffen's name wrong, and the number of the people he killed. It concludes by asking for 'a less frivolous and rather more constructive approach to this whole matter.' A good start would be for writers on this whole matter to get at least some of their facts right.
Previous page
