A DOCTOR SENT TO PRISON

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXII, Issue 7222, 10 January 1885, Page 2 (Supplement)

A DOCTOR SENT TO PRISON

At the Derbyshire and Leicestershire Assizes, held at Leicester before Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, David Bradley, surgeon, Binnington, near Chesterfield, who was found guilty of an attempted criminal assault on a patient named Eliza Swetmore, in his surgery at Newbold, was brought up to receive sentence. Prisoner hung his head. The Lord Chief Justice, in passing sentence, said he quite agreed with the verdict of the jury, and in consequence of their acquitting him of the full offence, it wis not possible tor him to do more than pass a long sentence of imprisonment. Prisoner was a medical man, with the education of a gentleman, necessarily having delicate and tender women submitted to him from time to time ; and he forgot all the restraints which his education, his character, and his position ought to have thrown around him, and forgot them with respect to a person standing to him in the peculiarly delicate and tender relation of his own patient. be (tho learned knew that what he was about to do was severe, and ho meant it to be severe upon this principle. What wero gentlemen hotter than other people for What had they the advantages God had given them for ? What had they better education for, if not to restrain them from acts of that kind ? Therefore it was just, iu his opinion, that when they were properly convicted of offences of that kind they should sutler more than common people should suffer, because they sinned against greater advantages and greater light. He should ihcrefore pass the severest sentence the law allowed, that of two years' imprisonment with hard labour.