An ordinary meeting of the Society was held on Wednesday 1st October 2008. The new President, Dr Jill Graham, was in the chair. After the minutes were read and approved she introduced the speaker, Dr David Doyle a Neuropathologist from Glasgow University who spoke to the title “Fashions in head injuries and fashions in dispatching infants”.
“Falling backwards causes more brain damage” he started “and is a cause of childhood death. But proving it was the cause of death is especially difficult”.
He described his early training in Edinburgh with a Dr Ford Robinson, who had discovered that the spirocheate was the cause of GPI, and the post mortem room with the most beautiful rose garden which it transpired was where the PM room assistants dumped the blood after autopsies! He was especially interested in trauma and remained a police forensic pathologist for the West of Scotland until retirement. In his early days, when at Oxford, he was interested in impact free head injury and, as he was a pilot, he devised experiments by doing aerobatics at Farnborough with forces ranging from +6 to -6 G which are the same forces as being struck. He found that this produced the same cerebral injuries as being shaken, namely haemorrhage, axonal injury and swelling of the brain; and these are also the same changes as those found in head injury.
However he said the mantra of the courts today is that subdural with retinal haemorrhages and brain swelling automatically equals shaking, but he disagreed with this school of thought. He cited a number of cases, in which parents denied shaking, but were found guilty based on these findings. He asked, “in the absence of other signs of trauma what would make you think shaking had occurred?”. He said there were no pathological signs definitive of shaking; the only thing might be gripping marks on the child. In the absence of these you cannot say definitely that a child has been shaken and he felt these convictions might not be safe. We don’t really understand what is going on and more research is needed.
The talk was followed by a statement from the treasurer Dr Rodger Sleet. He said that subscriptions were stable and the income was slightly up and that at present we had a balance of £1700 in the current account. He also informed us that a Prudential Bond had matured.
There being no other business the meeting was closed at 10.05 pm.