In some cases there simply has not been the chemistry needed between ministers and senior officers.”. The fact remains that the Labour Party ran a very slick and successful media campaign in the run-up to the election, and ministers were unhappy with what they found at many of their departments.”It is a fact that many ministers were relying on the briefing papers sent from the Millbank monitoring unit, and we had to either adapt or see our role being eroded So this came about. Quite frankly they have an awful lot to learn from the Labour Party in this”.A senior information officer said: “We are always willing to learn. Any ” mistake” or “twisting” of the perceived facts by journalists will be immediately noted and passed on to appropriate departments.Ministers want to know how their statements or actions have been portrayed at the earliest opportunity. A junior minister complained: “It was a shock after dealing with the people at Millbank to come here. Many of them, and their advisers from Millbank, were astonished to discover that some duty press officers do not have access to the first editions of the newspapers at night.After one press conference, a senior minister called his Whitehall press team together to complain he had never been so badly prepared.

The use of myrrh, which came only from south-west Arabia, suggested the hospital was rich and well-connected.Infestations of lice and scabies, frequent among the malnourished, were treated with arsenic preparations which were still in use in the Royal Edinburgh hospital in the 1960s. If you can get hold of the seeds you can get inside the mind of the medieval physician,” said Dr Moffat.Opium was mixed with lard to provide an analgesic salve for wounds. The addition of myrrh, a highly efficient bactericide, and honey gave it antiseptic as well as painkilling properties. Dr Brian Moffat, the archaeologist who has led the investigation, said that some English kings returned again and again. “It was usually the ones with blood on their hands – Edward I, II and III.

One can only assume the facilities were up to their standards. They didn’t like to rough it, you know.”Dr Moffat, who describes himself as a professional muckraker, has been analysing the contents of the hospital’s drains for more than a decade looking for clues to the remedies and treatments used. Grisly evidence of amputations comes from the “surgical offcuts” that litter the site and mixtures of seeds indicate the drug cocktails that were given “Discarded seeds are the mirror image of a recipe. Pregnant women were given ergot and juniper berries to induce labour long before natural childbirth was thought of, and patients afflicted with melancholia were offered St John’s wort – still in use and known as “nature’s Prozac”.Records held in archives at Edinburgh’s National Museum show that the hospital, one of the largest in Europe in the Middle Ages, was taken over on at least 80 occasions by English armies.

But his work will reportedly be printed alongside new US research showing that of 155 cases of “near miss” Sids cases at a hospital in Massachusetts over 20 years, in which children have reportedly stopped breathing and been revived, one-third had suspicious circumstances.The article brings together research that started in the 1980s and reportedly involved the filming of hundreds of parents hospitalised with their infant children.. A medieval hospital that straddled the main highway between England and Scotland has yielded the secrets of its extensive pharmacopoeia showing that centuries-old treatments offered to the casualties of war between the two countries have never been bettered by modern medicine. More than 200 herbs and spices were used in combinations to provide early painkillers and anaesthetics, antiseptics and anti-depressants for the retreating English armies – in some cases hundreds of years before their first previously recorded use.
Though the discovery has surprised historians, it will be greeted with quiet satisfaction by addicts of Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael books – whodunnits about a medieval monk who potters in his herb garden, concocting remedies.Detailed examination of the “medical waste” – mainly blood and human remains – retrieved from the drains of Soutra Hospital near Edinburgh, show that the Augustinian brethren who ran it for 500 years, from the 12th to the 17th centuries, were sophisticated physicians able to offer everything from major surgery to sleeping draughts for insomniacs.Battle-scarred soldiers facing amputation were anaesthetised with a cocktail of black henbane, opium and hemlock – several hundred years before the age of anaesthetics is understood to have begun with the discovery of ether and chloroform in the 1830s. His work is described in a new book, The Killing of Innocents, published in the US by Bantam.Dr Lucey refused to supply a copy of the journal, saying it was embargoed for publication in November, and Dr Southall did not return phone calls yesterday.

But two decades later the mother in the case, Waneta Hoyt, confessed to killing five of her children.Dr Southall, armed with studies of thousands of children, led those who challenged the notion that Sids ran in families and set out to prove that it was impossible to identify babies that were going to die. It helped to create an entire industry devoted to diagnosing and testing for Sids. Dr Southall has become a major figure in a debate that has raged on both sides of the Atlantic for 25 years over the medical diagnosis of Sids and how often it is a cover for child abuse or infanticide – particularly where a previous death of a child in a family is blamed on cot death.In 1972, Pediatrics published an article that examined two deaths from Sids in a New York family, and suggested that it could run in families. It already feels so dated it would have been fairer to farm it straight out to UK Gold.
La Femme Nikita (C5, Fri) was initially scheduled to begin its run the night before The Funeral. Paediatrician Dr David Southall became a deeply controversial figure when it emerged that he had arranged the secret taping of parents after their children were hospitalised because they were thought to be at risk of cot death – also known as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (Sids).
But Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatricians, will publish his work as the leading article in its November issue along with a “laudatory” commentary from one of America’s best-known experts on child abuse.The journal’s editor, Dr Jerold Lucey, said Dr Southall had been pilloried in some quarters in Britain for approving the secret filming of families where he suspected that abuse, not medical illness, explained cot death.