The Organ Helpline had been set up on Tuesday and has hardly stopped ringing since. Once it emerged that the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals Trust had some 4,400 former patients' brains in storage, making it second only to the besieged Alder Hey children's hospital in terms of organs retained, the concern of local relatives was as palpable as it was predictable.

To lose a loved one a child, especially is perhaps the darkest human experience imaginable. To later discover or even suspect that the loved one's body has been to quote, "Plundered" in the interests of medical research is to experience such feelings of shock and emotional devastation that can only be imagined.

Of the emotive cargo held within the Radcliffe Infirmary and accumulated over a period of 30 years, about 350 of the organs stored had come from children. The patients' brains had been removed at the John Radcliffe Hospital during post mortems either ordered by the coroner or carried out with the consent of relatives to determine the cause of death.

The Alder Hey revelations and subsequent scandal had quickly exposed that trust, like life itself, is a precious and fragile entity.

And if it was no longer possible for patients and the relatives of patients who had died to have total faith in the medical profession in matters of simple human dignity, how then would the teaching and research for which the Oxford hospitals are renowned be able to progress in future?

Would the organ scandal, perceived as medical arrogance and gross insensitivity, become a scourge which threatened work in the fields of neuro-science, or research into brain injuries, schizophrenia or new variant CJD?

Aware of how voicing a worry like this might appear at such a time, no-one at the Trust was anxious to express concern, although, privately, the issue had been raised and would have to be dealt with eventually.

The Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals Trust had moved quickly to demonstrate its concern and allay public misgivings. The chief executive offered apologies to the distressed and promised openness and transparency.

It had been no-one's intention, he added, to mislead.

But still the helpline kept ringing.

Well before lunchtime yesterday, 150 calls had been taken and logged, from the frantic and the uncertain and the sheer bloody angry who had found no comfort whatsoever in revelations that a brain of a child had been dumped and discarded as medical waste.

By mid-morning, the media circus was in full swing. No fewer than seven TV crews had turned up at the Trust to film, interview, probe and record. To bear some sort of witness on behalf of the emotionally dispossessed.

The chief executive and various experts tried to explain why the nature of the Radcliffe Hospitals Trust research was different, why it was vital and all very different from Alder Hey or any of the others featured on that morning's list.

But the public's fears remained real for all that. As the day wore on, the first words of the Hippocratic Oath were brought to mind:

'First, do no harm...'

And still the helpline continued to ring.