In 1947, a postmortem on Mrs Evelyn Tugwell found that she had died of
peritonitis, which had set in after an operation to remove a tumour. It also
found that the 12-inch-square surgical pack left inside her body by the surgeon
might have encouraged the infection which led to her death. Fans of real-life
hospital horror stories should read The World’s Worst Medical Mistakes by Martin
and Karen Fido (Sevenoaks, £7.99, ISBN 1 86200 001 8): there is much, much
more where this came from.
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