As I have remarked from time to time, doctors and nurses are human beings like the rest of us. All of us are flawed in some way or other. Should we really be surprised to discover that some doctors and nurses do things that deliberately harm patients? Probably not, but murder? Here are some stories about the most horrible of crimes. They should keep you up at night.
A nurse in Italy administered lethal injections to 38 of her patients because they or their families annoyed her. Sometimes she took selfies of herself with the recently departed. She was described by a co-worker as a cold woman, who always was willing to work. Please don’t let her be on shift when I am in the hospital.
Four nurses in Austria murdered patients for years in the late 1980’s. One evening they were overheard in a bar laughing about their latest victim. The eavesdropper went straight to the police station. The nurses admitted to 48 murders, but authorities suspected there may have been many more.
A pediatric nurse in San Antonio killed at least four children by injecting them with bleach.
A New Jersey nurse is suspected of killing over 400 patients during a 16 year period when he worked at various hospitals across the state.
An Australian forensic psychiatrist who has studied murders by medical personnel believes that they are often unrecognized and are greatly underreported. He believes the most common form of clinically caused death is the murder of elderly patients by nurses. He is quoted as saying that for every one street crime murder, there are five clinical murders performed by nurses. I am not feeling better yet.
An Ohio doctor raised suspicions when his colleagues noticed that patients tended to die suddenly when he was on duty. He served five years in prison for non-fatally poisoning some co-workers. After he got out of prison, he was able to get a job at a VA hospital, where another of his patients died. Rather than be arrested, he fled to Zimbabwe, where he got a job in healthcare and killed still more patients. He was arrested on a visit to the United States and charged with murdering patients. He pled guilty to avoid the death penalty. He may have killed as many as 60 patients. His journals describe the intense pleasure he derived from the killings.
Old movies often play up the stereotype of the kindly British family doctor. One not so kindly family doctor in Britain killed at least 215 of his older, female patients over a 25 year period. He did it for money. After he got them to sign over their property to him, he would send them to their eternal reward with a fatal injection of painkillers. He was caught when he forged a dead patient’s name on a deed conveying her property to him.
A Philadelphia doctor who performed late term abortions delivered a number of viable babies whom he then murdered by severing their spinal cords. He also overdosed patients, spread infections among his patients through the repeated use of unsterilized instruments, and generally botched some procedures, causing bowel and other organs to be perforated.
Another Ohio doctor was alleged to have deliberately overdosed patients with opiates to hasten what he claimed were their impending deaths. At least 34 patients were thought to have been killed by this doctor.
A doctor in Chicago in the late 1800’s is thought to have been America’s first serial killer. He was probably just the first one they caught. While in medical school, he stole cadavers which he used in staged “accidents” to collect on insurance policies he had purchased. He built a hotel, which he equipped with soundproof rooms. It had a dissecting table and a crematory in the basement. He ran gas lines into some of the rooms and used them to asphyxiate guests. Many women entered the hotel and were never seen again. When he was caught, he confessed to 28 murders but authorities believe he may have killed over 200. This guy was hanged.
A Dallas doctor is serving time in prison for tampering with IV bags by injecting sedatives and painkillers into them. A colleague who gave herself an IV with a contaminated bag died. Many patients suffered cardiac events during routine outpatient surgery and had to be rushed to the hospital. The doctor was caught through the use of surveillance video, which showed him on multiple occasions removing IV bags from a warmer and then replacing them soon after.
A German doctor who worked as part of a palliative care team visiting elderly patients in their homes murdered four of them and set their houses on fire to cover his tracks.
The most disturbing element of these murders is how the killers were able to get away with it for so long. The most likely explanation is that we tend to trust doctors and nurses and it is a fact of life that patients die. That makes it a lot easier for a serial killer to hide their work.
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