It is not appropriate to criticise the professional activities of yesterday with the knowledge of today (“Blundering doctor ‘killed’ Keats”, News, October 25). To state that “Dr James Clark delayed treating Keats for tuberculosis for almost a month because he wrongly thought the poet was suffering from stress and a routine stomach ailment” is to overlook the absence of accurate diagnosis and specific treatment. Clark’s use of bleeding and starvation was an accepted treatment then.

Keats died in 1821; post-mortem tubercle “warts” were not noted until 1862, and the tubercle bacillus was not discovered until 1882. Clark’s belief that Keats had a “stomach ailment” is in keeping with modern medical experience that some chest conditions may produce symptoms that suggest a “stomach ailment”. Clark’s error was in not relieving Keats’s severe symptoms. This was particularly distressing to Keats, since, as a qualified apothecary, he knew what was available.

As has been pointed out in my recently published The Dying Keats: A Case for Euthanasia?, fear of the “Keatsian experience” is one of the problems driving the call for assisted suicide today, despite our knowing that this is caused by a lack of effective care.

Professor Brian Livesley
Oxford

Poisoning cats is not the stuff of humour

I am really not too sure how tongue-in-cheek Rod Liddle’s “Antifreeze — cool for cats” (Comment, last week) was meant to be but it did not make me laugh (he does, however, generally raise a smile). Several years ago, in my capacity as a magistrate, I sat on the case of a local man who had killed more than 20 cats by giving them antifreeze. We were told by an expert witness — that is, a vet — of the slow and agonising death the cats would have suffered. Evidently cats cannot resist the sweetness of antifreeze and, while I do appreciate the problem of cats’ toilet habits, there are other, rather less drastic, methods of keeping them away.

Victoria Toone
Nuneaton, Warwickshire

Pets have to do their business somewhere

I don’t like dogs — they are noisy, they invade your space and they defecate wherever they like — but I would certainly not condone killing them with chemicals in food. Pride over material things, such as a garden or house, is purely a human thing. Does an animal deserve to be killed for urinating on strawberries?

Rachael Simpson
address supplied

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