Review: Medical Murder

While not my own preferred reading matter, take a look in any bookshop and you will find a ‘Crime’ section bursting with books on various real life killers. The market is obviously a fairly large one, and if titles are anything to go by, then it is tales of serial killers that provide the most spine-tingling moments in interested readers.

To this already booming section can now be added Robert M Kaplan’s Medical Murder: Disturbing Cases of Doctors Who Kill.

While not providing the same visceral response as a psycopath who kills with a blade, there is something certainly chilling in contemplating the men we entrust our lives to (and they are all men described in Kaplan’s book) actually planning to do us harm. Seeing a doctor is often all about suppressing our natural survival instincts because we believe it is for our greater good — why else would we sit still and let someone stick a needle in our arm?

So the chance to delve into the minds of those who took the oath to “first do no harm”, only to go back upon it so remorselessly, should provide an interesting window into some of the darker reaches of the human mind.

Kaplan does try to go beyond the usual format of simply presenting an array of killers by interspersing chapters that attempt to deal with the psychology behind the acts he describes.

And we can use all the help we can get to make sense of the crimes he relates. How to make sense of someone like British GP Dr Harold Shipman, regarded by his patients as a brilliant practitioner, who was found to have unlawfully killed 215 patients, but may have been responsible for up to 450 deaths?

Kaplan, who is a Wollongong-based forensic psychologist, would appear to be well suited to the task, but he sometimes seems to be working at cross purposes. At the end of the chapter on Shipman, for example, having laid out his crimes in great detail and hypothesized about possible incestuous relations with his mother, he exhorts us to not see him as anything more than “just another killer”, concluding with the fairly anticlimactic description “What a sod”.

If Kaplan is trying not to elevate his collection of “clinicides” above other killers, he sometimes makes the mistake of allowing his text to become a little too purple. Consider this description of Shipman: “a medical Jekyll and Hyde wandering through Little-Old-Lady-Land, unsheathing a lethally loaded syringe, droplets of silent sudden death oozing out of the tip of the velated surgical-steel needle ...”

There is also a problem with assertions that are delivered in too sweeping a fashion or not sufficiently explained. For example, another medical murderer, John Bodkin Adams, is described as being of an “endomorphic stature”, which “raises the question of sleep apnoea, a condition which is associated with sleep-related crime”. Kaplan fails to then explain to the lay reader what sleep-related crime is and what the incidence is in correlation with sleep apnoea sufferers.

Other case studies stretch from the first recorded medical murders through to Sydney psychiatrist Dr Harry Bailey (of the Deep Sleep Therapy scandal) and even Dr Radovan Karadzic.

Kaplan has researched his book well, and should be applauded for attempting some explanation instead of simply supplying a voyeuristic description of foul crimes. He even outlines what steps can help prevent future cases. No doubt there is a market for such a book, trying as it does to bring us a little closer to understanding how a small fraction of those we trust to heal us can instead become our cause of death.

[RETURN TO TOP]

HOME > BOOKS > ARCHIVES 2009 >