Criminal Malpractice Stories
Harrowing stories of the most egregious medical practices, ranging from catastrophic ignorance to malevolent criminal malpractice. These stories from history serve as a constant reminder that blind trust in a single medical practitioner's opinion can carry profound risks. Reader discretion is advised.
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Dr. Death: How Christopher Duntsch Turned the Operating Room Into a Crime Scene
In the summer of 2011, a neurosurgeon named Christopher Duntsch arrived in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex with what appeared to be an impressive résumé. He held both a medical degree and a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. He talked about his surgical ability with the unguarded confidence of someone […]
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The Cancer Doctor Who Invented His Patients’ Diagnoses: The Case of Dr. Farid Fata
The patients who sat in the reclining chairs at Michigan Hematology Oncology believed they were fighting for their lives. Some of them were. Others had nothing wrong with them at all. A few were in remission and had been for years. Some were dying of other causes entirely and had been told the chemotherapy their […]
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The Surgeon Who Promised Miracles: Paolo Macchiarini and the Synthetic Trachea That Killed His Patients
For a few years in the early 2010s, Paolo Macchiarini was one of the most celebrated surgeons in the world. He had apparently done the impossible: grown a patient’s own stem cells on a plastic scaffold and implanted it as a functioning windpipe. The scientific press called it a revolution in regenerative medicine. The Karolinska […]
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The Boy Who Volunteered to Help Others: Jesse Gelsinger and the Death That Changed Medical Research Forever
Jesse Gelsinger was eighteen years old and in good health when he enrolled in a gene therapy clinical trial at the University of Pennsylvania in September 1999. He had a manageable metabolic liver disorder that he had controlled since childhood with diet and medication. He was not dying. He had not exhausted other treatment options. […]
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The Nurse Next to Your Bed: Charles Cullen and Sixteen Years of Killing Across Nine Hospitals
Charles Cullen was quiet. He was unremarkable in appearance, pleasant enough to work with, and consistently described by colleagues as someone who seemed to care about patients. He worked the night shift. He had a troubled personal life that most of his colleagues knew something about. He had attempted suicide multiple times. None of this, […]
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The Nurse Who Created the Emergencies She Was Praised for Surviving: Genene Jones and the Deaths of Infants in Her Care
Parents who brought their sick children to the pediatric intensive care unit at Medical Center Hospital in San Antonio during the late 1970s and early 1980s noticed one thing consistently about a nurse named Genene Jones: she was always there. When a baby went into crisis, Jones was present, moving fast, calling for help, doing […]
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Starvation Heights: Dr. Linda Hazzard and the Fasting Cure That Killed Her Patients
The locals in and around Olalla, Washington, had a name for the property. They called it Starvation Heights. The people they occasionally encountered near it, stumbling along the dirt roads toward town, were skeletal, sometimes barely coherent, sometimes begging for food from strangers. These were the patients of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard, who had built […]
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The Ice Pick and the Lobotomobile: Walter Freeman and Three Thousand Four Hundred Lobotomies
The operation took about ten minutes. The patient did not need to be in a hospital, did not need an operating room, and did not need to be under general anaesthesia. A local anaesthetic applied above the eye was sufficient. The surgeon would lift the upper eyelid, position a modified surgical instrument along the upper […]
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The Surgeon of Trenton: Henry Cotton, the Focal Infection Theory, and the Patients Whose Bodies He Dismantled
The idea seemed logical at the time, in the way that catastrophically wrong ideas often do. Henry Cotton had read the emerging bacteriological literature of the early twentieth century and had come to believe that the mind could not be sick if the body were clean. Mental illness, he concluded, was caused by bacterial toxins […]
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