The Aftermath: Public Perceptions of Unethical Practice

Abstract

In 1990 Sandra Coney reported Graeme Overtons ‘alarming statement’ that at National Women’s Hospital they were ‘still doing mainly what Herb did’ in the treatment of CIS.¹ What she failed to appreciate was that National Women’s was far from alone in this. Professor Malcolm Symonds from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Nottingham in the UK wrote the same year, “The worrying thing about all of this [the findings of the Inquiry] is that what is actually suggested in the management protocol [in 1966] really looks very little different to the standard method of managing in situ carcinoma at the present time.’² Auckland University professor and later head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, John France, later confirmed that, ‘You would go out to a meeting somewhere else, internationally the support was all for us, colleagues overseas were strongly supportive. They were doing similar sort of things.’³ And yet a view that unethical practice had occurred at National Women’s, which was aired in the press during the Inquiry, became increasingly entrenched in the literature and in the public mind, both locally and overseas.