Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy is an ailment dreamt up by Professor Sir Roy Meadow back in 1977. He took an existing condition — Munchausen’s syndrome, wherein the victims feign illness to draw attention to themselves — and added “by proxy” to describe victims who, he said, induced illness or injury in a third party in order to draw attention to themselves.

I hope that medical science will record that I am the inventor of an entirely new, if related, mental illness, Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy by proxy, to describe doctors who make up illnesses for other people to suffer from in order to draw attention to themselves. We might call it “hubris” for short.

Meadow is now appearing before the General Medical Council accused of “naive, grossly misleading, incompetent and careless” use of statistics that contributed to the conviction of women accused of killing their young children.

Angela Cannings, one of the women wrongly jailed after his testimony, wants him to be struck off. You can understand her anger and it has been shared, pretty much without exception, by the entire media. Yes, strike him off! Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy may end up being struck off, too, one of these days. A growing number of other experts believe that it does not exist except in the unbending minds of paediatricians. It is no longer recognised as a psychiatric disorder in some Australian states and its status in America is under threat.

Certainly there can be few fictitious illnesses (it is known officially as a “factitious” illness, but I prefer my spelling) that have caused quite so much misery. An estimated 30,000 children have been taken away from their parents in this country after a diagnosis of Meadow’s pet condition. In America alleged sufferers have been sentenced to death for murdering their children solely upon the evidence of clever and eminent paediatricians.

Clearly Meadow — who, as a former president of the Royal College of Paediatricians, is about as eminent in his field as it gets — is not alone in believing that children are being bumped off, willy-nilly, by their parents or guardians. It is a view that was for a long time an article of faith in paediatric circles. While it held sway, the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the judges, the juries were prepared to listen to “expert” paediatricians and treat their testimonies as unvarnished, disinterested, objective fact, not beholden to fashion, personal subjective belief or professional arrogance. Why? When an expert “scientist” steps onto the witness stand, for some reason our natural scepticism dissolves: we listen, agog, uncritically. And then a few years later when the science changes — as it always does: that is the point of science — we vilify them for their earlier stupidity.

Meadow’s “crime” was to state what he believed. It looks very much as if he was utterly, hopelessly wrong; but in that he was far from alone. Many crimes have been committed against the Angela Canningses of this world and his professional arrogance is perhaps one of them.

However, the rest of us shoulder more blame for our failure to see science as it really is: a collection of rather wonderful stories that we make up in an attempt to explain the world around us, stories that are flawed, subject to endless revision and usually downright contradiction. But never certain. Scientists are, in the end, always proved wrong or at least not quite right — even the most eminent of them. Talk to Aristotle or Copernicus or, for that matter, Einstein. Yet they all adhere to their theories with a commitment that, shall we say, transcends the objective observation of events. So put them on the witness stands, but listen with caution.

Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy is a quintessential example of that most suspect of scientific theories — one that brooks no rational argument, a closed circle we all must accept at face value.

For example, the only cure must begin by the sufferer accepting that he or she is afflicted with the condition — which, of course, the alleged sufferer is loath to do. But if someone who is diagnosed as a sufferer vociferously denies it, this serves to reinforce the diagnosis. A denial of the condition is, perforce, a symptom of the condition. And then there’s this: there is no cure but it is accepted that sufferers can sometimes continue to live among other people without exhibiting the symptoms — murdering people or making them ill. Furthermore, there is no agreed biological or psychological cause.

So there we have it: an illness that has no cause or cure and that is diagnosed at least partly by the alleged victim’s denial that he or she is so afflicted. The more the victim denies it, the more obviously the victim is afflicted. And it is an illness that may somehow exist within a person without cause or cure or indeed any manifestation of its symptoms.

In the medical establishment, in the law courts and in the press, why were we prepared to believe this guff for more than a quarter of a century and send people to prison as a result?

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