The Spectator

Letters: The silencing of Meirion Thomas; finding the Cross of St George in Tuscany; and healthy scepticism about NHS privatisation

Plus: Why Burchill is wrong about middle-aged women and vanity

issue 10 January 2015

This turbulent surgeon

Sir: I have taken Meirion Thomas to task before in your letters pages, saying that since one third of NHS professional staff are immigrants, it would seem churlish to deny health visitors access to the very doctors we have poached from them.

Meirion Thomas is not a whistle-blower (‘Bitter medicine’, 3 January) — he has not told us anything that our own prejudices haven’t already informed us of. And quite rightly he is being encouraged by his colleagues to zip it. Is there any business, let alone political party, that would tolerate such pointless, if not divisive, mudslinging from within?
Dr Tom Roberts
Derby

Medical cover-ups

Sir: Freddy Gray’s piece on Meirion Thomas last week is a worrying reminder that medicine, despite its dependence on scientific truth, still hides truths of other sorts when they prove inconvenient or embarrassing.

Forty years ago a pig-farmer friend visited his wife and newborn baby in a local hospital, where there had been an outbreak of a ‘mystery illness’.

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