Sir. Dr Bill Tormey goes on writing about the management of death as though with the authority of a physician. We arc not told in what discipline he earned his doctorate.
We're told that he is a "consultant chemical pathologist" at two hospitals. That is far from being a practising physician. When did he last sit, as a personal physician, with a real, live, but dying patient?
I suspect that he has no more authority to write about the management of terminal illness or death than have I or any other ordinary citizen, and has not one hundredth of the authority of Dr Paddy Leahy, regarded as nearly a saint by thousands of actual patients in an area of poverty such as Dr Tormey has probably never known. - Yours, etc.,
Carrickmines Station,
Dublin 18.