The Case of the Medical Notebooks

“Everything and quickly,” declared M. Maginot, Minister of War, when he learned of the scandal of the medical notebooks. We don't know if that's all, but as for be quick...

For several weeks now, doctors and pharmacists have been locked up and no one has indicated when the investigation will be closed, where and when the defendants currently in Chave prison will appear before the courts. However, if public opinion was satisfied, when Mr. Cavaillon, examining magistrate, made proceed to the various arrests, it now shows a certain concern, public opinion. She is surprised that it is so long! The anger she showed against the delinquents seems to want, following too long a prevention, to be transformed into a feeling of sympathetic pity...

"Is that what we want to achieve?" Would we thus prepare a general dismissal?

Leaving aside this hypothesis, which would appear to many to be tainted by favouritism, we echo the conversations that we hear every day and which seem to us to reflect fairly accurately the opinion of the greatest number. Why, it is said, persist in keeping defendants in prison who, if they are found guilty by the examining magistrate, should be returned to the competent tribunal ? And if the proof of their guilt is not sufficiently established, if the conclusive evidence is lacking, why not allow them provisional release? There is, in short, in this affair only a question of big money. The Cousins, the Isoards, the Platons and other medics who are behind bars are not dangerous men for society...

They are defaulters, of course. After all, they are not Apaches, who are likely to stun you at the corner of a street... So what danger would there be in releasing them on bail ?

We do not think, however, that Doctor Platon, deputy mayor of Marseilles - who has not yet resigned from his various elective offices - would have the nerve to go and fulfill his duties as an civil registrar at the city Hall.

M.B.