Thank heavens for Professor Dick van Velzen. When a medical scandal erupts, it is invaluable to have a lightning conductor for public fury, and the professor is the textbook villain. Even better, he is Dutch and therefore subtly distanced from British pathological niceties. His research at Alder Hey hospital was suspect, his collection of human spare parts excessive, and his transparency left much to be desired. On Friday he was temporarily suspended by the General Medical Council, according to its convention of administering a mild knuckle-rap long after every other forum - barring the court of law the professor may still face - has pronounced judgment.  A post-mortem on van Velzen's press clippings offers a grim carve-up of a man depicted as a composite of Burke and Hare, with a dash of Hannibal Lecter and a smattering of Mengele thrown in. Forget Alan Milburn's homily about paternalistic consultants stuck in a 1940s time warp. Van Velzen, as portrayed in the media, more resembles a dodgy doctor of Elizabethan times - a practitioner of sapientia  prisca, the ancient wisdom based on the occult. But the professor, for all his flaws, is hardly a necromancer. Nor has he killed anyone. In hoarding body parts without consent, he was only doing, albeit on a grander scale, what other doctors did.   That does not excuse the pain he caused to relatives. But neither does it quite explain the Health Secretary's demonisation of van Velzen - a symbol of 'gruesome' and 'grotesque' events evoking Gothic tragedy. Perhaps Mr Milburn thought that tremulous horror would play well with an electorate   which is not, by and large, in favour of pickling babies. If so, he miscalculated. His behaviour looked so opportunistic and badly-judged that one wonders how he will cope with the next d&eacute;bcle.   Alder Hey was only the warm-up. Any time now, the Kennedy report into the Bristol children's heart deaths disaster is due to reach Milburn's desk. The largest ever independent investigation into clinical practice in the NHS has already been unaccountably delayed. There is still no word of its progress or its findings, except that Professor Ian Kennedy is likely to discard the lone villains thesis and focus on the broad systems failures linked to James Wisheart and Janardan Dhasmana. Given Milburn's messianic stance on patient power, you might imagine that he would be desperate to release the Bristol findings. But perhaps not.  The whisper from the royal colleges is that if the Kennedy report is not delivered soon, it may conveniently smoulder in the Ministerial in-tray until after the election, thus sparing Milburn the necessity of confronting the problems of an NHS plunged into deepening gloom.   Doctors, it seems, are the new teachers; members of a profession which once put up with the rigours of the job partly because society esteemed them. These days, cat-stranglers boast a higher status. Beware your amiable GP, lest he turn out to be homicidal or incompetent. Mistrust your surgeon, a vainglorious conflation of the Emperor Napoleon and Sir Lancelot Spratt. Never hand over a scrap of tissue from your dear departed, unless doctors sign a contract elaborate enough to cover the purchase of the Dome. The latest doctor-bashing, as administered by Milburn, was a precise echo of the attack a fortnight ago by Sir Donald Irvine, the GMC president.   According to Irvine, the flawed and secretive culture of the NHS allows 'paternalism' and poor medical practice to go unchallenged. This is a bit rich, given that the GMC is the  dernier cri  in self-protection, obfuscation and dilatory treatment of the miscreants it is supposed to police. Irvine's tirade, designed   to encourage consensus, instead united the British Medical Association and the medical royal colleges in a scornful denunciation. Doctors want the council halved to 50 members, with an executive, weighted towards lay people, of about a dozen. If Irvine cannot oblige, then Milburn should scrap the GMC and think up a better structure, for the sake of patients who must get the 'balance of power' skewed their way.   Milburn is a curious patients' champion, who, so far, has abolished community health councils and installed weaker patients' advocates. The suspicion is that avenues for legitimate complaint are being closed, while patients are being encouraged, rashly, to be as strident as they wish. But, as Alder Hey has proved, patient power is hardly the Delphic oracle. Patients want medical progress but would quite like it to be achieved without the use of dead humans or live animals. They want kidney transplants but recoil at the thought of selling superfluous thymus glands used in anti-rejection research to pharmaceutical companies. Given the poverty of hospitals and the outrageous profits of drugs firms, the only scandal seems to me the nominal price of 10 a sample.   Our odd attitude to morbidity and death is supposedly rooted in the veneration an irreligious society accords to the body rather than the soul, but that cannot be right. Church burials are a model of corporeal respect, whereas secular cremations involve only a conveyor-belt ride through Dralon curtains to the incinerator as the piped Bach plays. It seems more likely that our horror of death is rooted in an age of spurious immortality, where those who swallow their vitamins, do their Pilates, count their   calories and get their Botox jabs may dream of frozen youth and deferred death, if not quite of eternal life.   Hence the absurd fuss about bodies dumped in a hospital chapel and stripped of 'dignity', a commodity that never attaches to the dead and, in hospital, rarely to the living. There is nothing dignified in childbirth or in surgery. I once watched a hip replacement operation, which resembled a cross between  Medea and an Alan Titchmarsh chainsaw demonstration. Riveting, but hardly stately.  Dignity, however, matters to patients, and patients' voices matter to Mr Milburn. As, of course, they should. But where to draw the line? Emboldened by deserved public sympathy, the Alder Hey parents - in an echo of Denise Fergus demanding a say on the punishment of the Bulger killers - clamour, unjustifiably, for court action and mass sackings from an excellent hospital that has saved 1,600 children who would otherwise have died.   In addition, the parents will sue for 10 million compensation. Two rival firms of solicitors vie for rights to this lucrative business. Hospital switchboards are jammed by those who fear their children's organs may lie in some glass jar. A commission is assembled to hand back sad relics whose discovery serves little purpose, beyond eclipsing joyful memories of a living child. Pathologists warn that life-saving operations are already ceasing for lack of donor organs and that medical research will be gravely affected. There are no winners here.   The Bristol report will have to produce a more positive outcome. Threaded through the failings of one hospital will be the wider, unanswered questions - on why there is such a misfit between managers, doctors and regulators, on how over-centralised bureaucracy is stifling the NHS, and on why, in a time of government opulence, doctors profess despair. This time, Milburn will need more than the hot rhetoric of reform. If he gets it wrong, the result may make Professor van Velzen's chamber of horrors look tame.