in the hospital. In this way he discovered the name of the twins\' mother, but not the address of the family. Finally he sought out hospital cleaners and porters who confirmed the facts of the case and divulged that the children had left Keighley and were going to be separated. The family\'s address was finally established from the town\'s electoral register. At this stage the reporter returned to the hospital for a promised press conference, which never materialized.

The claims of newspaper organizations point to a change in the dependency of the relationships between hospitals and their local press. Testimony supplied by an individual journalist, taken alongside other accounts of "the press and the twins", suggests that an absence of official information resulted in reporters having greater recourse towith the advent of the national service. The routine procedure was therefore an attempt to re-build these relations by offering practical suggestions and guidelines on the ethical principles governing release of patient information. After all, the issue of communicative authority and more general matters of information control had not been sufficiently addressed in the planning and implementation of the new service. Modes of information control (confidentiality, anonymity) were the core of medical-ethical debate at this time. In the context of nationalized hospitals and a salaried medical service, this oversight constituted a highly productive space in which the authority of the medical profession could be publicly enacted.

Disputes regarding ownership of and access to medical records had emerged in relation to the introduction of National Insurance in the early part