Genre:

News-Commentary, Drollery

Subjects:

Medical Practitioners, Medical Treatment, Mental Illness, Gender, Crime, Patronage

    Discusses Mr Punch's recent visit to the 'Court of Queen Victoria's Bench' where he witnessed the end of a case in which a woman called Mrs Symm, 'who had taken to drinking, and had been a sufferer of delirium tremens', had dragged her 'medical benefactors', Dr Fraser and Dr Andrews, into court for 'ill-treating her'. Punch relishes the fact that the verdict was in the doctors' favour, and that a subscription list has been started in the Lancet for meeting the large legal costs incurred by the doctors. Notes the eminence of the subscribers (including Forbes B Winslow, Ernest A Hart, Francis Sibson, and William Fergusson), and calls for subscriptions from 'everybody who ever did or ever expects to need medical service'.