Dr.Robert M Kaplan
Allen and Unwin 2009
To heal or
harm - the clinical God complexes, egos and psychopaths that have brought
horror to healthcare
January, 2000. World-wide headlines announce that Dr
Harold Shipman, an English General Practitioner, had been found guilty of murdering several hundred of his
patients, making him one of history, and medicine's, most extreme serial killers ... but certainly not
the first or last. Doctors are the new priesthood, they are the ones to whom we
turn in periods of trouble, the ones we trust with our most personal details
and the ones to whom we allow access to the most intimate recesses of our
bodies. They are the standard by which many court cases rise or fall, they have
the power to give us time off work, decide the success of a damages case and when
we are at death’s door, make decisions which can either save or kill us.
All doctors take the Hippocratic Oath which is
based on the simple dictum of 'first do no harm', so what drives a doctor to cross
that line to murder? There is no simple answer. There are many forms of
killing, from negligence to arrogance, from political to financial. While some
of the worst cases seem to involve a God complex, where the doctor gains
personal satisfaction even excitement from having the power over life and death
and being able to use it.
In some many cases these doctors are able to get
away with killing many hundreds of patients as nobody suspects the good
natured, kind, bespectacled doctor who has lived in the neighborhood for years
and helps elderly patients of being a cold killer even a vicious mass murderer.
Yet that is exactly the scenario of Dr. Harold Shipman.
There are many other motives. There was Dr Harry
Bailey, the Sydney psychiatrist who dispatched numerous patients with the
discredited Deep Sleep Therapy just because he would not accept his therapy did
not work. Then there is Dr Radovan Karadzic, the psychiatrist who led the genocide
during the Bosnian War, whose medical ethics were totally disconnected from his
political ambitions. There was Dr William Palmer who poisoned his victims for plain
old money, and the recent chilling case of Michael Swango who killed his
patients and colleagues just for the thrill of it. Far from being unique
exceptions it emerges that medical murder, or clinicide, has a long history in
the profession.
Forensic psychiatrist Dr Robert M Kaplan has made
an extensive study of doctors who kill. Medical
Murder goes beneath the scrubs, behind the operating theatre
doors and into the minds of medical history’s most notorious and infamous
characters. Kaplan unearths their twisted motivations and grapples with the
chilling paradox of why these healers' spend years learning the techniques of
preserving and saving life only to use their position and skills to tear it
away.
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This
review will appear in Volume 2 No.4
(2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.
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