This is only to be matched in effrontery by the statement of some wise-acre at the radical meeting on Tuesday night. Being asked why no notice had been taken in the Lancet of a successful operation of lithotomy performed by Mr. B. Cooper, soon after the publication of the libel, he assigned as the reason that Mr. Wakley thought it might increase the damages, and otherwise injure Mr. Cooper! What a noodle the man must be to expect any one to believe him[21]! Mr. Wakley asserted that the evidence of his witnesses remained "untouched--wholly uncontradicted;"--whereas there was scarcely a single point in their statements which was not contradicted either by Mr. Callaway, who was present at the operation, or Mr. Key and Dr. Hodgkin, who examined the parts after death. But what is more remarkable, there was scarcely a circumstance on which his own witnesses agreed--for example, they differed with regard to the nature and direction of the incisions; with regard to the manner and frequency of introducing the forceps; with regard to the number of instruments used, and the mode of applying them; with regard to the size of the wound; with regard to the degree of force employed, and with regard to the appearances after death. Yet, in the face of all this, Wakley had the impudence to tell the jury that his evidence remained "uncontradicted." We have no hesitation in asserting that his own witnesses (putting Mr. Cooper's out of the question) advanced no charge of which they did not also furnish the refutation. Mr. Wakley asserted that Mr. Cooper was incapable of telling why he could not extract the stone, even "while he had his finger in the bladder." This is false: neither Mr. Cooper nor Mr. Callaway were able to reach the bladder with the finger at all, owing to the depth of the perineum. Mr. Wakley told the jury that the plaintiff did not like the bladder to be exposed, "because to surgeons there is indisputable proof that Bransby Cooper did not perform that operation as he ought," and that "Mr. Key and Mr. Callaway knew it." This is false: Mr. Key, Mr. Callaway, and Dr. Hodgkin, who had examined the parts, all deposed that there was nothing in them indicative of the operation having been improperly performed. Indeed, had it been as Wakley asserted, the plaintiff would not have been so foolish as to have had the parts preserved at all.