THE STRANGE SURGICAL OPERATION IN MELBOURNE.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume III, Issue 429, 18 November 1876, Page 2

THE STRANGE SURGICAL OPERATION IN MELBOURNE.

The Australasian says : —“ The case of the unfortunate woman Charlotte Connelly, who died recently after an operational the Alfred Hospital, demands more earnest investigation than it has yet received at the instance of the authorities. The deceased was suffering from some morbid growth in the stomach, to remove which it was necessary to perform a most critical operation. The woman was informed of the danger, aud she willingly agreed to encounter it. She was duly chloroformed, aud Air R. Robertson performed this operation, assisted by Mr Girdlestone and other medical men. The morbid growth was found to be a cancer, and a portion of it was removed ; but it would have been certain death, it is understood, to have removed the remainder, so the incision made in the abdomen was sewed up. The woman subsequently died, when the post mortem examination disclosed the fact that the operating doctors had sewed up in the unfortunate creature’s body a pair of steel forceps and a piece of sponge. Either of these foreign substances was, of course, sufficient to cause death, and the question naturally arises, therefore, did the woman die through this stupid blunder on the part of the operators, or from the effect of the operation itself? If we assume that death was inevitable without being accelerated by professional clumsiness and neglect, then the operation might just as well have been performed completely. The presumption is that either the operators were nervously unfit to perform so delicate and dangerous a task, and in their agitation omitted to take away the sponge and forceps, or that they were shamefully neglectful in not removing them. Viewed in any light, it is a very ugly case, and one that is calculated to prevent persons suffering from internal disease subjecting themselves to the tender mercy of hospital doctors in future.”