Rx for Trouble

Roses, gladioli and snapdragons adorned his bedside table in bright profusion as Dr. Hugh Hamilton, one of Kansas City's leading obstetricians, spent his 49th birthday last week in the St. Joseph Hospital, where he had practiced for many years. The second-floor staff brought in a cake with pink icing. But it was not a happy occasion, for outside his room stood police guards on around-the-clock duty, turning away visitors. The day before, Dr. Hamilton had been charged in a warrant with trying to poison his wife; it was the latest of the many troubles that have plagued Hugh Hamilton in recent years.

Dr. Hamilton came from a family of physicians. His father, brother and cousins had made Hamilton one of the most respected names in Missouri medicine. Smart and engaging, Hugh Hamilton followed in the family tradition, prospered, and in 1950 took out, through Lloyd's of London, a $400,000 policy against injury to his deft surgeon's hands. The insurance was written in such a way that it also covered the loss of his other limbs.

Nine months later, as Dr. Hamilton limped downstairs (his right foot had never recovered from an infection incurred during his World War II military service) to try out a shotgun in his basement range, the weapon went off, shredding his bad right foot. It was amputated later that day, and in less than four months, Dr. Hamilton received his tax-free $400,000. It was one of the largest personal-injury indemnities ever paid.

Last September a bomb exploded in one of his treatment rooms; it was the last of seven still-unexplained blasts that shook Kansas City in three weeks. No one was seriously injured, but, as Hugh Hamilton said last week, he was so worried about the "pressure" resulting from rumors about the bombing that he three times considered suicide.

Last week his wife, Mrs. Martha Matilda Hamilton, went to police with a strange story. In preparing for a recent trip to California, Mrs. Hamilton said, she needed a new supply of pink capsules for a digestive disorder. Her husband insisted on getting them for her. She said she had been worried about Hugh's mental health and, nagged by a premonition, had the capsules analyzed in California; chemists found cyanide in the capsules.

A warrant was served on Dr. Hamilton in the hospital, where he had gone after suffering a broken hip in another fall. In his trouser pocket police found a bottle containing seven more cyanide capsules, which the doctor said he had thought about using on himself. He also told the police that he intended to use the cyanide for mounting moths in a collection. The charges made by his wife, he said, were "fantastic and absurd."

The flowers in the hospital room were a birthday gift from his wife, received just before the warrant was served.

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