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A brief history of docs of death |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Wednesday, 11 July 2007 |
That most suspects in the recent British terrorist attacks are educated doctors may have come as a shock to many but history is rife with records of physicians and surgeons who became mass murderers, serial killers.
While some of 19th and 20th centuries' most heinous medics-turned-killers carried out their spine-chilling acts in the name of science, others were obsessed with the power they thought they had over life and death.
Many of them were difficult to detect and stop as they went after their victims who were vulnerable and always within reach. Famous public trials have immortalised chilling acts of mass murders by doctors like German physician, Joseph Mengele, who turned into a Nazi mass murderer, Harvey Crippen, Jeffrey MacDonald, Harold Shipman, America's 'Dr Death' Jack Kevorkian, 'Torture Doc' H H Holmes, French physician Marcel Andri Henri Filix Petiot, starvation doctor Linda Burfield Hazzard and Japanese microbiologist Shiro Ishii.
The present day terror world has its fair share of doctors-turned-killers. Ayman Al Zawahiri, Al-Qaida's No 2, is a trained paediatrician, George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who was responsible for many acts of terror, along with Hamas leader in Gaza Mahmoud Zahar, are trained as surgeons.
Likewise, Abu Hafiza, commander of Al-Qaida's Moroccan cell that provided logistics for the 9/11 attacks, is a trained psychiatrist and Fathi Abd Al-Aziz Shiqaqi, the late founder of Islamic Jihad, was a physician.
However, the most notorious was Joseph Mengele, who gained notoriety as 'Angel of Death' for extermination of Jews in Nazi camps. He would decide which prisoners would be killed and who could be spared for a while to be used as labour. He performed inhuman experiments on camp inmates.
Holmes was no less sinister. His appetite for wealth led him to torture, kill and cremate his 150 victims in the basement of his castle of horrors, complete with gas chambers, windowless torture rooms, acid vats and trap doors.
Besides killing men to use their corpses to collect insurance money from policies taken out under fictitious names, he would lure women into his castle and after forcing them to sign over their savings, he would throw them down an elevator shaft and gas them to death.
Linda Hazzard transformed diet into a killing tool, bringing down a curtain on over 18 lives. Assuring people that her starvation diet would rid the body of all toxins, Hazzard would convince people to come to her sanitarium called 'Wilderness Heights', where the doctor would encourage patients to turn over their property and wealth to her name before starving them to death.
More recently, UK's Shipman was another prolific doctor-turned-killer who used morphine to kill 215 people in their own houses. According to Dr Regina Dwyer, a retired physician living in Seattle, doctors are taught that while death is the enemy, it is also natural and inevitable. So for those who are inclined towards turning homicidal, their training and practice make it easier to kill.
Because clinical trials are part of medical science, testing of potentially lethal drugs on humans is common practice which doctors get accustomed to seeing. When it comes to ethics, Dwyer says doctors don't employ the same extreme measures to prolong the life of a terminal 95-year-old as they do when faced with a gravely ill child.
Unfortunately, sacrifice by neglect to just sacrifice then becomes a relatively small leap. For the homicidally inclined, triage ethics provide a handy rationalisation for mere murder.
"The everyday business of medicine creates a god complex in some practitioners that first blinds them, and then seduces them to view their deviltry as noble work toward higher purposes," Dwyer says.
It is believed that Jack the Ripper, who killed and mutilated prostitutes in London's East End, displayed the clinical precision of a medical man.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/A_brief_history_of_docs_of_death/articleshow/2192717.cms
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