Mayhem?

Under California's penal code, any person who "unlawfully and maliciously deprives a human being of a member of his body, or disables, disfigures or renders it useless" is guilty of mayhem, punishable by one to 14 years' imprisonment. Last week in San Francisco, Drs. Tilton Edwin Tillman and Samuel George Boyd were arrested for mayhem, released on bail. On the ground that she was mentally incompetent, Dr. Tillman advised and Dr. Boyd had performed an operation sterilizing Ann Cooper Hewitt, 21, great-granddaughter of the late great Philanthropist Peter Cooper, granddaughter of the late great Statesman Abram Stevens Hewitt, only child of the late great Inventor Peter Cooper Hewitt. The charges were an outgrowth of a $500,000 damage suit which Ann Hewitt, claiming she had been sterilized during an appendectomy because her much-married mother wanted control of a $3,000,000 trust fund left by her father, had brought against the physicians and her mother last month (TIME, Jan. 20).

Dr. Tillman, big, jolly and 55, has for twelve years held a political appointment as member of San Francisco's lunacy commission, but he advised the operation in his private capacity as family physician without consulting his colleagues. Dr. Boyd, a small, precise, elderly Harvard Medical graduate, has never before been touched by scandal.

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