The Cartwright Inquiry was a committee of inquiry held in New Zealand from 1987 to 1988 that was commissioned by the Minister of Health, Michael Bassett, to investigate whether, as alleged in an article in Metro magazine, there had been a failure to treat patients adequately with cervical carcinoma in situ (CIS) at National Women’s Hospital (NWH) by Herbert Green, a specialist obstetrician and gynaecologist and associate professor at the Postgraduate School of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of Auckland. The inquiry was headed by District Court Judge Silvia Cartwright, later High Court Justice, Dame and Governor-General of New Zealand. The Report of the Cervical Cancer Inquiry was released on 5 August 1988. Background A 1984 medical paper published in Obstetrics and Gynecology by colposcopist Bill McIndoe, pathologist Jock McLean and gynaecologist Ron Jones, who were all employed at NWH and colleagues of Green, as well as statistician Peter Mullins, described a study of 948 women who had been diagnosed with cervical carcinoma in situ (CIS) at New Zealand's National Women's Hospital from 1955 to 1976. The authors retrospectively divided the women with CIS into two groups: those with normal cytology follow-up at two years after initial management (817) and those who continued to have abnormal cytology (positive smears) (131). Among those who continued to have abnormal cytology, a much higher proportion developed invasive cervical or vaginal vault cancer (22% versus 1.5% over five to 28 years). The authors concluded that CIS of the cervix had significant invasive potential. Using that paper, the medical experience of one of Green's patients as a case study (under the pseudonym 'Ruth') and interviews with staff, a freelance journalist, Sandra Coney, and an academic, Phillida Bunkle, published an exposé, 'An "unfortunate experiment" at National Women’s Hospital', in Metro Magazine in June 1987. The article alleged that Green was carrying out research on his patients without their knowledge or consent and that since the mid-1960s, he had been withholding conventional treatment from some patients with CIS. Coney and Bunkle took the title of their article from a 1986 letter in the New Zealand Medical Journal by Professor David Skegg, a University of Otago cancer epidemiologist and expert in population screening in which he referred to "the unfortunate experiment at National Women's Hospital" in his reply to Green about the study. The authors claimed that no one could give them an assurance that the study had been