Herb Green

George Herbert Green (16 November 1916–4 March 2001), B.A., BSc, M.B., Ch.B., (D.Obs. R.C.O.G.), M.R.C.O.G.(Lond.), was a New Zealand Obstetrician and Gynaecologist who led the National Women's Hospital Cervical Cancer Unit as Professor through the 1960s and 1970s and became notorious for conducting an alleged unethical experiment that was the subject of the Cartwright Inquiry.

Green was born in the rural South Otago town of Balclutha, New Zealand.

He attended South Otago High School, where he studied University papers before even leaving high school.

He later said that one of his teachers died of cervical cancer, and this sparked his lifelong interest in the disease.

Green attended the University of Otago and earned a B.A. in 1938, BSc (including pure and applied mathematics) in 1940, before studying Medicine.

He graduated with M.B., Ch.B. in 1946, the same year as Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes.

While at University he gained a Blue in Rugby, and also represented Southland in Cricket.

He was described as "a powerfully built man who towered over his colleagues".

Green worked at the National Women's Hospital as a House Officer and Registrar from 1948 to 1950.

In 1948 he passed the RCOG Diploma in Obstetrics, scoring third highest in the exam.

As a registrar he was reported to show an aptitude for statistics and analysis.

He gained RCOG Membership in 1950.

In 1951 he went to work and study in the U.K., where he worked at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead, Tyne & Wear.

In 1955 Green returned to New Zealand, as Consultant Obstetrician at Wanganui Hospital.

In 1956, while attending a training course at the National Women's Hospital, he was recruited back to work there as a Consultant.

He shifted back there in 1956, joining the 'D' team which was primarily responsible for treating reproductive tract cancers.

Whilst becoming the senior consultant in D team it is an exaggeration to say that he saw "nearly every woman who came to the hospital with invasive cancer and many of those with the earlier or precursor stages", as was claimed around the time of the Inquiry.

He was concerned about risks of surgery leading to infertility, and Cartwright refers to him being "increasingly concerned at the number of young women undergoing hysterectomy for the disease (CIS) which he regarded as unnecessarily radical".

Green was the doctor at the centre of the Cartwright Inquiry, a commission set up to examine claims that he had been experimenting on patients without their consent between 1966 and 1987 (supposedly continuing after his retirement in 1982).

The inquiry argued that he had conducted a study between 1966 and 1987 in which the cases of women with major cervical abnormalities were followed without definitive treatment, in an attempt to prove his "personal belief" that these abnormalities were "not a forerunner of invasive cancer."

A subsequent history by Linda Bryder found that Green's views, far from emanating from a personal belief, arose from his wide reading of the international literature which was questioning aggressive approaches to abnormal cells of the cervix or what was then called Carcinoma in situ. According to Judith Macdonald, a researcher at the University of Waikato, Green was strongly opposed to abortion, and that this influenced his views on management of abnormal cells of the cervix.

This suggestion was refuted by Green and other witnesses at the Inquiry, and was explored in Bryder's history.

Green retired in 1982, although still actively engaged in academic debate to criticism from Skegg in 1985, but by the time of the Cartwright Inquiry in 1987, he was quite frail, ending up in hospital with pneumonia after several days of questioning.

After Green retired, a paper was published in 1984 summarizing the fate of women diagnosed with carcinoma in situ at National Women's Hospital between 1955 and 1976.

Journalist Sandra Coney (1987) states that "He wanted to save women from mutilating surgery and to do so he had to prove what at first he had suspected and eventually came to believe: that CIS was a harmless disease which hardly, if ever, progressed to invasive cancer.".

Outside of his cervical cancer work he was an early proponent of the Pap smear, although not necessarily of population-based screening programmes.

He was also anti-abortion, and opposed sterilisation without women's consent.

This paper came to the attention of Phillida Bunkle and Sandra Coney, who published an article entitled "An Unfortunate Experiment" in Metro Magazine in June 1987.

(The full phrase "an unfortunate experiment at National Women's Hospital" first appeared the year before in the New Zealand Medical Journal, in a letter from Professor David Skegg. ) From that time forward, media articles used the term "unfortunate experiment" extensively.

Defenders of Green argue that there was no experimentation, with or without patients' knowledge; that the allegation by Coney, Bunkle and others that he divided patients into two groups, one of which was treated, and one of which was not, was false (his patients were treated on a case-by-case basis); that he did not withhold treatment from patients; that his methods of treatment were not substandard, and have in fact come to be regarded as the international standard.

Green died in St John's Hospital, Auckland on 4 March 2001.

This publication along with the publication in 2009 of a history of the Cartwright Inquiry sparked an extensive debate in the New Zealand Medical Journal in 2010, including 39 letters to the editor and three editorials, one by the author of the history, Professor Linda Bryder, who argued that the 2010 retrospective study did not, as alleged, settle the debates about what happened at National Women's Hospital, and nor did it 'prove' that 'treatment of curative intent' had been withheld at the hospital.

Iain Chalmers reached a similar conclusion and pointed out the debt owed to Green by all those women who have avoided needless surgery and kept their fertility.

Other academics, such as Anne Else and Phillida Bunkle, dispute Bryder's claims and support the outcomes of the Cartwright Inquiry.

David Skegg states that Chalmers' comments are one sided and misrepresent the Cartwright Inquiry's purpose.

The Cartwright Inquiry, according to Skegg, was not a trial of Dr Green, as Chalmers interpreted it, but an inquiry into the treatment of CIS at National Women's Hospital during the period.

A 2010 study compared patients diagnosed with cervical carcinoma in situ during Green's study period with those diagnosed beforehand and afterwards (the three periods being 1955–64, 1965-74 - the 'study period', and 1975–76).

This study claimed that his patients were at substantially greater risk of cancer and were subjected to numerous extra tests that were intended to observe rather than treat their conditions.

The authors failed to recognise that these patients had been treated by one of the twenty or so consultants at the hospital and not exclusively by Green.

The study concluded that eight of the eleven deaths among the women followed up occurred in the group who received punch or wedge biopsy as their initial management, but admitted that 'the numbers of deaths were too small to make reliable comparisons'.