The great libel case

the long version

Dr. Robert Hunter, the plaintiff in this London libel case, had lost his action against the Pall Mall Gazette for publishing defamatory libels about his medical qualifications, his professional ethics and his actual treatments of patients with pulmonary tuberculosis. He here forcefully defends his medical qualifications ("Doctor of Medicine of the University of New York, and Licentiate in Medicine and Surgery of Canada"), counters the "charges of 'inveigling' and 'terrifying' persons to become my patients, of 'deluding' them with the hope of being able to cure them, when I knew that I could not do so; of 'extorting enormous fees', and of 'malpractice'." Hunter's painstaking self-defence and self-justification throws much light on the treatment of TB in mid-Victorian London at a time when the number of deaths caused by TB in urban populations was indecently high.