despicable doctors
August 03, 2015
Be careful what you say
during surgery, doctors.
There are a lot of despicable doctors out there, ranging from those who
murder their patients to those who are downright insane. Other doctors,
however, can be despicable without even realizing it.
May 21, 2015
Walter Freeman is known
in history as the father of the lobotomy, an infamous procedure that
involved hammering an ice pick-like instrument into a patients brain
through their eye sockets. The horrifying procedure often left patients
in a vegetative state and is responsible for an estimated 490 deaths.
March 25, 2015
They dubbed him the
babymaker. Cecil Jacobson was a US fertility doctor who was indicted in
1992 for using his own sperm to impregnate his female patients.
December 09, 2014
Dermatologist Richard
Sharpe turned out to be a sharp-shooter, ending his wife Karen’s life
with a rifle shot, a bull’s eye—sinking lead deep into her chest.
November 12, 2014
In July 2012, a
pathologist was found shot and stabbed to death in his Lubbock, TX home,
the result of a murder-for-hire plot perpetrated by a plastic surgeon
whose evil motive can be traced to 1 of the 7 deadly sins: envy.
November 03, 2014
One of the most
atrocious eras in human history is without a doubt the Holocaust. About
11 million people, including approximately 6 million Jews, are estimated
to have been slaughtered at the hands of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi
Party.
October 14, 2014
Thomas Harris is an
American author best known for a series of suspense novels that
showcased one of the most despicable fictional doctors ever. His second
novel, Red Dragon, published in 1981, introduced his most infamous
character, the cannibalistic killer, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The books
sequel, The Silence of the Lambs, was published in 1988, and the story
was made into a major motion picture starring Anthony Hopkins as the
dreadful Dr. Lecter, catapulting the murderous evil character into superstar.
September 23, 2014
Jack the Ripper is the
most notorious of all serial killers. There have been more books written
and more movies made about him than any other murderer in history. The
case of the infamous criminal has fascinated people for more than a
century, and most intriguing of all is the fact that no person was ever
charged with the crimes. Suspects have run the gamut, from barbers,
lawyers, and famous authors, to even doctors. However, Jack the Ripper
may have finally been identified, according to a UK businessman who
privately funded an investigation into the 19th century case, and it
turns out the killer wasn't a doctor, but a 23-year-old Polish immigrant
named Aaron Kosminski.
September 09, 2014
Ana Maria
Gonzalez-Angulo seemed to be at the peak of her career. As a tenured
associate professor at the University of Texas, she specialized in
breast cancer and was chief of clinical research and drug development at
the MD Anderson Cancer Center. Her research has been funded by big-name
players in the field, including the National Cancer Institute, the
American Society of Clinical Oncology, and Komen for the Cure. She was
also chair of the Endocrine Resistance Working Group, and a member of
the Correlative Sciences Working Group for the Transliteration Breast
Cancer Research Consortium, the Breast Cancer Committee of SWIG, and the BIG-BANG Triple Negative Working Group. With such sparkling success,
its a wonder why Gonzalez-Anglo would risk giving all that up by
attempting to kill someone.
August 12, 2014
Almost as soon as Dr.
Jayant Patel's medical career began, colleagues questioned his surgical
skills. Complaints of gross incompetence and negligence ignited
inquiries from medical authorities, causing Dr. Patel's license to be
restricted in the state of Oregon in 2000. He then moved to New York,
where after a short time, medical authorities pressured him to surrender
his medical license in that state for reasons of professional
incompetence in 2001.
July 22, 2014
This column usually
deals with real-life doctors who broke their oaths, committed despicable
crimes, and almost always ended up in prison to pay for their
transgressions. But in honor of author Mary Shelly's birthday (August 30,
1797), whose most famous novel, Frankenstein, has been turned into many
major motion pictures, wed like to take a quick look at some of the
most dangerous doctors in the history of film.
July 08, 2014
What a piece of work is a
man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving
how express and admirable, in action how like an angel...ah, never mind.
Dr. Arthur K. Zilberstein, a 47-year-old anesthesiologist licensed in
the state of Washington since 1995, has had his medical license
suspended after it was alleged that he had been sexting while on duty at
his hospital, including during surgeries he was assigned to, among
other digressions.
June 20, 2014
A bespectacled,
unassuming man who stood only 5 3 tall, Hawley Harvey Crippen fulfilled
his childhood interest in medicine by graduating from the University of
Michigan School of Homeopathic Medicine in 1884, and then securing an MD
from Cleveland's Homeopathic Hospital.
After medical school, he moved to New York and got a job with a
homeopathic pharmaceutical company run by a Dr. Munyon. Shortly
afterward, he met and wed Charlotte Bell, a nurse, and the couple had a
son, Otto. In 1892, Charlotte died suddenly of apoplexy (a former
medical term for a stroke). Crippen could handle the stress of raising
his son alone, so he persuaded his parents, who lived in California, to
take total responsibility for the upbringing of his 2-year-old son.
June 10, 2014
He was suspected of
killing 163 of his patients between 1946 and 1956. Many died under
suspicious circumstances. It was widely believed that his murder weapon
was a cocktail of morphine and heroin, administered via lethal
injections. What's more, most of his dearly departed elderly patients
included the doctor in their wills; he even assisted in rewriting the
wills for some of them. In the process, Dr. John Bodkin Adams became one
of Britain's wealthiest general practitioners. Yet when he was tried in
court, in a sensational trial in 1957, a jury found him not guilty of
the one murder charge brought against him. The bottom line was that
there was a mountain of suspicious circumstances, but not a single piece
of compelling evidence. In addition, several witnesses who testified
against the doctor, including a nurse, were discredited during his
trial, making their testimonies for the prosecution not very reliable or
believable. As for the money his dead patients willed to him, the
doctor claimed that it consisted of fees he neglected to charge those
patients while under his care.
May 28, 2014
Torture techniques
conjured up in medieval times, especially the gruesome methods employed
during the Crusades, took a giant leap forward thanks to Dr. Shiro
Ishii's diabolical imagination. The human suffering he was responsible
for remains unimaginable and incomprehensible. He is infamous for being
the director of a biological warfare research and testing program of the
Imperial Japanese Army that existed from 1937 to 1945 during the Second
Sino-Japanese War and World War II.
May 13, 2014
In 2002, a patient was
lying face down on an operating table with an open incision in his back,
about three-quarters of the way through an intensive 6-hour-long spinal
surgery being performed by Dr. David Arndt at Mount Auburn Hospital in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. During the surgery, Dr. Arndt repeatedly asked
one nurse if she could find out if his paycheck had arrived.
April 22, 2014
They just wanted to look
a little trimmer in the tummy and lose a little weight, but 2 patients
lost their lives instead during their liposuction procedures. Dr. Peter
Normann was an internist, an emergency room doctor, and not a plastic
surgeon, yet he performed liposuction surgeries on unsuspecting patients
at his clinic in Anthem, Arizona. Dr. Normann never entered a residency
in plastic surgery or anesthesiology; he did have about 6 days of
training in liposuction and breast augmentation, but he certainly wasn't
qualified to perform such operations. What's more, he had no training
in fat augmentation, yet he performed a buttocks enhancement plastic
surgery on at least 1 patient, who died as a result of gross medical
incompetence that led to a critical surgical error. It gets worse.
April 08, 2014
She got married when she
was 18 years old and had 2 children, but in 1898, she left her husband
and children to pursue her medical career. Linda Burfield Hazzard had
some training as an osteopathic nurse and no medical degree, but a
loophole in the law in the state of Washington granted her a license to
practice medicine. The obscure law awarded medical licenses to a few
practitioners of alternative medicine who did not have a medical degree
but were grandfathered in, and Linda was one of the lucky recipients.
Her degree described her as an osteopath.
March 25, 2014
Born on the island of
Cyprus, Josephakis Charalambous was 8 years old when his parents
immigrated to Canada, settling in Vancouver, British Columbia. Although
he was close to his mother and sister, somewhere in his upbringing, he
came to despise women and view them merely as sexual objects. He was
known to engage frequently with prostitutes to satisfy his seemingly
insatiable sexual drive and desire to control women. It is said that the
reason Charalambous wanted to become a doctor in the first place was to
attract women with his professional status. But once he became an MD,
women didn't flock to him as he imagined.
March 04, 2014
From 1942 through 1944,
Dr. Marcel Petiot, a highly respected physician in his community, saw an
opportunity to build his personal wealth during the insanity of World
War II in Paris. It was a black period in Parisian history, when Jewish
families hoped to escape slaughter. It was a surreal time in Paris as
World War II was raging; and disappearances were commonplace in the
Nazi-occupied city. There was nowhere to turn. Fearing for their lives,
Jews couldn't report missing persons to the Nazis.
February 11, 2014
He started off his
medical and criminal career as a swindler and subsequently added "serial
killer" to his resume. His birth name was Herman Webster Mudgett but he
was better known by his alias, Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, or H.H. Holmes.
At an early age, Mudgett expressed an interest in medicine and was said
to have practiced surgery (some called it torture) on animals. He also
expressed an utter fascination and obsession with death. Mudgett
received his medical degree in 1884 from the University of Michigan
Medical School. As a medical student, he utilized his skills as a
swindler, a fraud, and a con artist. He devised an elaborate scam where
he would collect money on false life insurance claims. Mudgett would
steal cadavers from the university laboratory and dismember the bodies.
January 28, 2014
Despicable is too kind a
word to describe Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Some called him a cold-blooded
killer. The state of Pennsylvania agreed with that description when they
convicted the doctor on 3 counts of first-degree murder for
slaughtering newborn babies and for the death of a woman who overdosed
on painkillers following her abortion while under Gosnell's care.
December 27, 2013
"Women are structurally
inadequate for intercourse. This is a pathological condition amenable by
surgery," so claimed Dr. James C. Burt, a gynecologist and
obstetrician, in his 1975 book, Surgery of Love.
Unfortunately, for many patients, Dr. Burt's genital reconstruction
typically resulted in the exact opposite effect he proclaimed his
procedures would have on them. Most of his patients suffered several
side effects, including sexual dysfunction because of pain during
intercourse, infection, and the need for corrective surgery after
undergoing Dr. Burt's bizarre medical procedures.
November 29, 2013
Dr. Max Jacobson fled
Nazi Berlin in 1936 and set up a medical practice in New York on the
Upper East Side of Manhattan. The location couldn't have been more
perfect. He catered to high-profile clients, including writers,
musicians, entertainers, and powerful politicians. His rich and famous
patients dubbed him "Miracle Max." The Secret Service code named him
"Dr. Feelgood" because of his unorthodox medical treatments for
President John F. Kennedy.
October 31, 2013
Michael Jackson, once
hailed the King of Pop, died in Los Angeles on June 25, 2009, the eve of
his 51st birthday. The official cause of his death was recorded as a
fatal overdose of a combination of the powerful, hospital-grade
anesthetic propofol and the anti-anxiety drug lorzepam. After the
autopsy, the Los Angeles County Coroner concluded that the superstar's
death was a homicide.
September 24, 2013
Biomedical Tissue
Services was his company's name; being a modern-day grave robber was
more his game. Dr. Michael Mastromarino was a successful oral surgeon
with a practice in New Jersey. He had a beautiful home, a wife, and 2
sons. He coauthored a prominent book on dental implants, Smile: How
Dental Implants Can Transform Your Life. He was highly regarded in his
field. How did this seemingly successful man later become known as the
Organ Grinder and the Brooklyn Bone Snatcher?
August 29, 2013
On June 12, 2012, Dr.
Jefferson Calimlim Sr, and his MD wife, Elnora, were deported from the
US under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) escort and returned
to their native Philippines, along with their son. They were both former
medical doctors in Milwaukee who had been convicted of keeping a Filipino woman as a virtual slave in their home for nearly 2 decades.
August 08, 2013
After midnight, near the
end of a 7-hour-long police interrogation that began on December 14,
2003, Charles Cullen said, "I did not want (people) to see me as this,
what I am." Somerset County detective Timothy Braun then asked him,
"What are you, Charles?" The 43-year-old nurse replied, "A man, person,
who was trusted and had responsibility for a lot of people dying...I
hate myself for it 'cause I don't believe I had the right, but I
couldn't stop, I couldn't." No, he couldn't, and incredibly, neither
could the medical establishment stop his reign of terror at the time.
April 26, 2013
Meet Kristen Heather
Gilbert, a smart, accomplished RN, but a troubled soul.
In her youth, Kristen Strickland was known as a pathological liar.
According to friends and neighbors, she often made the unfounded claim
that she was a distant relative of the infamous ax murderer Lizzie
Borden. Ex-boyfriends described Kristen as strange and controlling,
eventually exhibiting a pattern of verbal and physical abuse toward
them. For attention, she would fake suicide attempts, or when angry, she
would tamper with her boyfriends' cars or physically attack them,
scratching them with her nails.
March 01, 2013
Back in 1999, Dr. Allan
Zarkin, a Manhattan obstetrician, performed a Cartesian section to
deliver the first child of his patient, Dr. Liana Gedz, a dentist. Gedz
had every reason to trust her physician. Zarkin had coached Gedz through
7 months of prenatal care, and a strong doctor-patient relationship
developed into a strong friendship. It was the kind of bond that led
Gedz to invite Zarkin to spend summer nights with her and her husband at
their country home in East Northrop, Long Island.