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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Double-O Swango: The Doctor Who Killed Across Three Continents and Was Never Stopped Until It Was Almost Too Late
His medical school classmates at Southern Illinois University called him “Double-O Swango,” a reference to the fictional spy James Bond and his licence to kill. They said it lightly, as dark jokes about medicine’s proximity to death sometimes are. They said it because an unusual number of patients deteriorated rapidly when he was around. They […]
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Sister Amy’s Murder Factory: How a Connecticut Nursing Home Proprietress Poisoned Her Way to a Fortune
She was active in her local church. She donated a stained-glass window to her parish. She was described by her neighbours in Windsor, Connecticut, as a devoted and compassionate caregiver to the elderly residents she housed in her home at 37 Prospect Street. She called herself “Sister Amy,” a title that suggested not religious office […]
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Resuscitation Rambo: Niels Högel and the Largest Serial Murder Trial in German Post-War History
In the cardiac intensive care units where Niels Högel worked, he was known for a particular kind of excellence. When a patient went into cardiac arrest, Högel was there. He was fast. He was calm. He knew the resuscitation protocols. Colleagues praised his ability in a crisis. Some of them gave him a nickname: “Resuscitation […]
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The Lambeth Poisoner: Thomas Neill Cream and the Doctor Who Killed for Sport
On the morning of November 15, 1892, a crowd gathered outside Newgate Prison in London, one of the largest such crowds since public hangings had ended in England more than two decades earlier. Inside the prison walls, a Scottish-Canadian physician named Thomas Neill Cream was being led to the scaffold. He had been convicted of […]
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Dr. Eugène: Marcel Petiot and the Fake Escape Network That Killed at Least 27 People
In March 1944, neighbors in the 16th arrondissement of Paris began to notice a smell coming from 21 Rue le Sueur, a townhouse belonging to a physician named Marcel Petiot. Then came the smoke, thick and black, pouring from the chimney at all hours. Someone called the fire brigade. The firemen who went inside looking […]
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The Doctor of Eastbourne: John Bodkin Adams and the Trial That Defined End-of-Life Care
Between 1946 and 1956, 163 patients of a general practitioner in Eastbourne, Sussex, died under suspicious circumstances. Of the 310 death certificates he signed over the course of his career, 132 of the deceased had left him money or property in their wills. He drove a Rolls-Royce. He was, by some accounts, the wealthiest general […]
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Dr. Death Bundaberg: Jayant Patel and the Surgeon Australia Was Told to Ignore
Toni Hoffman was a nurse at the Bundaberg Base Hospital in Queensland, Australia. By 2004, she had been watching Jayant Patel operate for over a year, and what she had watched was frightening. Patients who had gone into surgery expected to recover from straightforward procedures were returning to the ward in states that their pre-operative […]
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The Surgeon Who Invented His Own Operation: Ian Paterson and Over 1,000 Victims
Somewhere in the span between 1993 and 2011, Ian Paterson performed a procedure he had invented himself on hundreds of women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. He called it the cleavage-sparing mastectomy. National guidelines for breast cancer surgery are precise on this point: when performing a mastectomy, no breast tissue should be left […]
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The House of Horrors: Kermit Gosnell and the Clinic That Regulatory Failure Built
The investigators who raided 3801 Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia in February 2010 were looking for prescription drug activity, not murder. What they found changed the nature of their investigation immediately. The clinic smelled of animal urine. There were cats loose in the procedure rooms. Bloodstained furniture, unsterilized instruments, and fetuses stored in bags and jars […]
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