"In reply to the protests of medical men and the memorial from doctors, which had been addressed to him, Mr. Gladstone succeeded in drawing a statement from Sir Richard Douglas Powell, the President of the Royal College of Physicians, who said that he thought the memorial exaggerated, though he admitted that forcible feeding was not " wholly free from possibilities of accident with those who resist." He added that, in dissenting from the view expressed by the memorialists, he was assuming that the feeding of the prison patients was " entirely carried out by skilled nursing attendants under careful medical observation and control." We, of course, know that this was not the case. A large number of doctors, including Dr. R. G. Layton, physician to the Walsall hospital, replied to Sir Douglas Powell by again recapitulating the dangers of forcible feeding. But indeed the opinions of medical men were unnecessary to those who afterwards came in contact with the women who had been forcibly fed. Their exhausted condition was a form of evidence that no argument could upset. It is important to note also that during the year 1910 two ordinary criminals, a man. and a woman, were subjected to forcible feeding. The man died during the first operation; the woman committed suicide after the second."