MODERN MEDICAL BULLETINS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR:1
la,—In your article in the Spectator of September 21st entitled " The Search for Health" it is stated that "the detailed ac- counts of President McKinley's wound remind us forcibly of the increased interest now displayed in all questions of health and its preservation," and it is remarked, further, that " hardly half-a-centinT since such minute descriptions of the internal derangements caused by a bullet would have been considered rather offensive, but to-day they are regarded as highly interesting and discussed wherever people meet
together." I beg leave, very respectfully, to differ from the writer's view of this matter. The reports from the sick-room of the late President, as given in the public Press, were cer- tainly copious, and not wanting in the pettiest details. They were furnished, as I venture to think, with but slender regard to the decency and respect which were due to the privacy of the patient. Many of them related to matters of treatment, which, if they were of any importance at all, might properly have been communicated to the medical Press, and were ob- viously unfit to be read, much less to be discussed, by the general public. I think it is much to be regretted that such delicate matters are now laid bare minutely, and retailed as news in our daily papers. It may perhaps be considered proper and becoming to publish such bulletins in the United States, but it is surely unseemly and un-English to pry into the sad and painful details of any man's sick-room, and forthwith to flash them into every household in the civilised world. As the writer of your article admits (and most happily, as I think), such publications were quite unknown a few years ago, and I do not hesitate to declare that they constitute a distinct decadence in manners and good taste. In the case of eminent persons in this country we sometimes find that the privacy of the sick-room is not held sacred, as it should be, but is somehow disclosed to the newspaper reporter. We have hitherto looked to our leading journals to set a high standard in matters of this kind, but many of them have unfortunately yielded to the modern unwholesome craving for unsavoury and sensational bulletins on the part of the public. Is it too much to expect that there may be a reversion to the more excellent ways of the past in respect of medical bulletins P-1 am, Sir, &c.,
DYCE DUCKWORTH.
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