Word: cons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...quiet French wine town of Mâcon on the Saone, the hospital's doctors and nurses wore worried frowns. Even Madame Anne-Marie Demussy, the usually calm head nurse, seemed upset. Something very odd indeed was going on. In less than three years, 15 women patients had died mysterious deaths under very similar circumstances...
...many of Mâcon's townspeople, she evidently did. In the public squares, angry crowds cried: "Voilà l'empoison-neuse!" One Paris paper called the case "Atropine and Old Lace" (atropine had been found in the viscera of one victim). But Detective Bascou, finally convinced that Nurse Demussy's ex-husband had lied about her, changed his tack. The detective decided that the solution must be a medical one, and began to study the hospital's post-operative treatment of gynecological patients...
...found the solution. Nurse Demussy, he said, was no murderess. But someone had been incredibly, perhaps fatally, careless. As standard treatment after an operation, he discovered, patients are given a salt-drip injection-one teaspoon of salt in a liter of boiled water. But the Mâcon Hospital nurses had become woefully unprecise: they had taken to dumping a tablespoonful, or even a fistful, of salt into half a liter of water-and given the solution as a rectal drip. Could such a strong salt dose have killed 17 women? Some of the detective's medical consultants thought...
...Health spokesman: "Absurd! . . . The worst that could have resulted was a case of diarrhea and an irritated rectum." But Detective Bascou was so sure of his ground that he closed his investigation as a police problem and recommended that a medical commission carry on. Solution of the Mâcon "murders" was now up to the doctors...
...named Herbert Pocket (Alec Guinness),and learns, instead, to be a snob. As he helps his old criminal friend to escape arrest and rescues Miss Havisham's ward, the beautiful Estella (Valerie Hobson), from a psychological trap, the noble and weaker sides of Pip's nature so con-.tend that he emerges a true...