A long history of deadly doctors
Medicine has thrown up more serial killers than all other professions combined
The trial of 41-yearold German nurse Niels Högel on multiple charges of administering lethal doses of medication necessarily brings to mind our own Dr Harold Shipman, the 20th anniversary of whose belated arrest – after murdering 240 of his patients – falls this year. Shipman was certainly unique in concealing for so long his murderous intentions behind the benign persona of a family doctor. But, as psychiatrist Herbert Kinnell has observed, medicine has “thrown up more serial killers than all other professions combined”.
Both the first serial killer to be hanged in the United States, HH Holmes (put to death in 1896 for the murder of 200 women in Chicago), and the last person to be publicly hanged in Britain, Edward Pritchard (who, in the 1860s, poisoned his wife, child, mother-inlaw and servant girl) were doctors.
Doctors’ wives are particularly vulnerable. Dr Kinnell cites several instances of not just the first spouse, but the second, third and even fourth, all dying in mysterious circumstances. Dr Milton Bowers used cyanide on his three heavily insured wives, Dr Alfred Warder eliminated his three wives with aconite, and Dr Roger Clements’s four wives all succumbed to morphine. At his trial in 1957, Dr Bodkin Adams admitted to “easing the passing” of his older patients – not unrelated, it was alleged, to his being the beneficiary of no fewer than 132 wills.
Still, Shipman trumps them all. He was the most popular family doctor in Hyde, with a waiting list to join his practice, due in part to his willingness to do home visits, which afforded him the opportunity to inject trusting patients with industrial doses of morphine. In 1997, the year before he was arrested, he was killing on average one patient every 10 days – 36 in just 12 months. It is astonishing, even in retrospect, that his murderous activities should have gone undetected for so long when a subsequent investigation of his records revealed he issued almost three times as many death certificates than would have been expected.
“He was a marvellous GP,” the son of one of his victims observed, “except that he killed my dad.” Wickedness incarnate.
Tragus trouble
This week’s unusual query comes courtesy of Mr PJ of Plymouth, troubled by intense itching of the tragus, that fleshy protuberance pointing backwards over the opening to the ear canal necessary (apparently) for the accurate localisation of sound. “When I retire to bed, it starts to itch uncontrollably,” he writes, lasting for about an hour and impervious to being massaged or “fiddling around with a cotton bud”. Several doctors with whom he has raised this problem could provide no explanation. Any suggestions would be gratefully received.
Moving upward
Finally, my thanks to a reader for his account of the marked improvement in his wife’s vascular dementia, diagnosed in May this year, as the cause of her impaired mobility, memory and visual hallucinations. A month later, she was admitted with a heart attack to Manchester’s Wythenshawe Hospital requiring coronary angioplasty and stents to restore the blood flow to her blocked coronary arteries. Four months on, “she can now walk without a stick and has had no recurrence of her hallucinations”, he writes. “Her memory is still not great, but then she is 91!”
The probable explanation for this unexpected, if felicitous, outcome would be that the angioplasty and stents in restoring the blood flow to his wife’s heart muscle also boosted its “efficiency” in pumping blood upward to perfuse the brain.
Improvement in cognitive function is also reported, and for similar reasons, following the successful treatment of disturbances of heart rhythm with drugs or a pacemaker. It would be interesting to hear from others who may have had a comparable experience.