These are three sentences from a short letter written by the author and published in the Morning Star 16th of December 2003. As a past trauma and orthopaedic surgeon I cannot easily accept that even the deepest cut into one wrist would cause such exsanguination (bleeding out) that death resulted. The two arteries are of matchstick size and would have quickly shut down and clotted. (He did not know then that the ulnar artery alone was transected ie cut across.) Furthermore we have a man who was expert in lethal substances and who apparently chose a most uncertain method of suicide. The first cause of death of Dr David Kelly as recorded by the coroner on the 14th of August 2003 in a death certificate which was less than lawful - “ I a. Haemorrhage b. Incised Wounds to the Left Wrist. (II Co-proxamol ingestion and coronary atherosclerosis.) (1) The first cause was re-iterated by Lord Hutton in his report 28th January 2004. 467 “Iam satisfied that Dr Kelly took his own life and that the principal cause of death was bleeding from incised wounds to his left wrist which Dr Kelly had inflicted on himself with the knife found beside his body. It is probable that the ingestion of an excess amount of Coproxamol tablets coupled with apparently clinically silent coronary artery disease would have played a part in bringing about death more certainly and more rapidly than it would have otherwise been the case. “(2) The author was moved to write the above letter because he shuns slovenly diagnosis and because he had grave doubts about the rumoured verdict of suicide by Hutton. He learned that an inquest of sorts had indeed been subsumed into the Hutton Inquiry. Law, logic and propriety required that there should have been an inquest first and when that was completed, an inquiry second. The letter drew him via the good offices of Ms Rowena Thursby into a small group of like minded doctors. One of these was a fellow surgeon of repute. The late Martin Birnstingl had been a surgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital with a special interest in vascular surgery; he had been President of the Vascular Society of the UK.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 21:23:09 +0000
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