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To the Editor.—The Editorial by Dr Woolf,¹ which nicely summarizes the diethylene glycol poisoning of 109 Haitian children reported in the article by Dr O'Brien and associates,² deserves comment for the distracting use of a metaphor, linking together these dire events in Haiti with a passage taken out of context from Dante's Divine Comedy.

The death of 98% of the Haitian children who ingested a contaminated acetaminophen syrup speaks for itself of its seriousness. Any attempt to color the poisonings, as Woolf does, with a strained and misconstrued image excerpted from 700-year-old medieval literature does nothing but lessen the gravity of the deaths and circumstances surrounding them. It is unfortunate that from Dante's famous work comes only a residue: a widely quoted and often misunderstood image. Today, una selva oscura, "a dark wood" in the translation by Sayers,³ applies to any bad circumstance or place. The etymons . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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