Demon Doctors: Physicians as Serial Killers

Demon Doctors: Physicians as Serial Killers by Kenneth V Iserson. Galen Press, $28.95, pp 520. ISBN 1 883620 29 5. See www.galenpress.com to order. Rating: ★★

Iserson writes clearly, although with occasional overtones of melodrama: given the subject matter, this is probably hard to avoid. Herman Mudgett, for example, is thought to have killed more than 130 people in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s. A graduate of the University of Michigan Medical School, he already had a childhood history of torturing and killing animals. While a medical student, he stole corpses and used them in insurance frauds. Working as a pharmacist in Chicago, he used the proceeds of various other frauds to construct a rooming house built to his specification by teams of builders, none of whom knew the whole plan. Mudgett included sound proof and airtight rooms, a dissecting room, an industrial size cremation oven, escape routes, and greased shafts in which he moved victims around the building. Killing or subduing people by controlling gas flow to their rooms or by using chloroform, he mutilated victims in his dissecting room, or stretched them on a specially made rack before killing them. He was finally caught and executed in Philadelphia after another murderous insurance fraud.

This volume offers no new insights, but performs a useful service in bringing information from disparate sources together in one volume. Some of those discussed in the book, including Mudgett, Thomas Cream, Marcel Petiot, and Harold Shipman, had largely incomprehensible motives. The motives of others are more apparent. In the 1980s in Japan a doctor with training in microbiology, Dr Mitsuru Suzuki, infected patients, family, and work colleagues with salmonella and shigella by various means, including lacing food, coating a tongue depressor, and contaminating medicines and barium contrast medium. Suzuki seems to have been driven by a desire for revenge on a system that he felt did not recognise his talents, and by his desire to complete a dissertation on S typhi outbreaks.

As in many of the cases discussed, the profession was accused of being slow to respond to Suzuki's actions, despite suspicions. In an earlier American example, Linda Hazzard, an osteopath who worked in Seattle as a doctor by virtue of a “grandfather rule,” championed a treatment regimen that resulted in many patients starving to death. Existing regulations made intervention difficult, and she continued to practise for several years until convicted of manslaughter in 1912. After her release, prospective patients sought her out, and she continued to offer her “fasting treatment” until the 1930s.

Hazzard and Suzuki are both on the edge of medical life. In Iserson's discussion of Dr Ishii Shiro and his colleagues, national medical establishments move centre stage. Shiro oversaw Japan's biological weapons programme from 1932 until the end of the second world war. Most of the research was conducted in mainland China, using the local population as research subjects. Experiments were mainly concerned with establishing the suitability of various disease organisms as weapons, and in developing ways of disseminating them. After being exposed to disease, many victims were dissected alive, often with no anaesthetic. Other Chinese victims were used for surgical practice, or subjected to cold or hypoxia in an attempt to gain militarily useful information. Hundreds of physicians seem to have been involved in these activities and, including those killed in China by biological weapon use, more than 200 000 people may have died as a direct result of their activities.

After the war, the United States negotiated access to the research results to support its own biological warfare programme. As part of the settlement, none of the major medical participants were prosecuted. Most continued their careers, and some occupied senior medical positions until the 1980s. These experiments, involving a large cohort of doctors who set aside their professional ethics because of national interests, and whose work was subsequently used by other doctors who knew the origin of the information, may represent a more fundamental challenge to the profession than the actions of isolated serial killers.

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Cleaning the guillotine after the execution of Dr Petiot

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Dr Mudgett

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Dr Shiro