10 Most EVIL Doctors

Andrew Wakefield

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He’s been called “one of the most reviled doctors of his generation.” In 1998, British researcher Andrew Wakefield published a paper in medical journal The Lancet alleging a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. A few years later however, investigations revealed that he’d falsified data and been paid over £400,000 by lawyers hoping to sue vaccine manufacturers. He also reportedly expected to rake in $43 million a year selling diagnostic kits for his new proposed ‘syndrome’. The paper was retracted, and Wakefield’s medical license revoked. In the years since, his work has been thoroughly discredited. Nonetheless, it helped kick off the anti-vax movement, for which he continues to advocate.

Fad diets have been around a long time. American quack doctor Linda Hazzard was a proponent of alternative medicine whose rhetoric might sound familiar today. She claimed to have a miracle cure that removed ‘toxins’ responsible for ‘imbalances’ in the body: fasting. Oh, and enemas that could last for hours. It was a novel idea: pay to starve. She called her sanitorium the official-sounding Hazzard’s Institute of Natural Therapeutics but locals called it Starvation Heights. Around 40 patients died there; over a dozen of these deaths have been attributed to Hazzard. She was convicted of manslaughter in 1911.

John Bodkin Adams

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In just 10 years, British general practitioner John Bodkin Adams had 163 of his patients die while in comas. Adams had a reputation for being incompetent - eating cake and falling asleep during procedures. But he also had another, more calculating side. When police finally started investigating the deaths in 1956, they discovered that 132 of his deceased patients had mentioned him in their wills. They suspected he’d used opiates to kill them on purpose. Adams was tried, but was acquitted, with the judge later opining that Adams had been merely “easing the passing” of the dying. Most assessments agree on Adams’ greed however, and the conflict of interest it created.

H. H. Holmes

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Holmes is sometimes called America’s first serial killer, although technically that title goes to the Harpe brothers - highwaymen in the late 18th century. Nonetheless, Holmes is definitely one of the most sinister. Born Herman Webster Mudgett, he attended medical school in Michigan, before changing his name and moving to Chicago, where people close to him, particularly women and children, began to go missing. Some were killed in his ‘Murder Castle’, a building he had constructed full of secret passages and chutes that dropped down into a basement equipped with acid pits and a crematorium. He was hanged in 1896 for the murder of his accomplice, carpenter Benjamin Pitezel.

This American doctor and former marine had a god complex - but he was more fascinated by the power of death than life. During his stint at a Veterans Affairs clinic on Long Island in 1993, patients began to die, one by one. By this time, Swango had been moving from hospital to hospital, poisoning patients and coworkers, often using arsenic, for a decade. He’d served five years for poisoning paramedics, then changed his name and just kept going. All in all, he’s suspected of murdering up to 60 people. Wanted by the authorities, he fled the States for Zimbabwe in 1994, poisoning more patients, until he was arrested at last and sentenced in 2000 to three consecutive life terms.

Nurses hid patients from him, and even colleagues called him “Dr. Death.” But somehow, surgeon Jayant Patel continued to practice medicine for years. After incompetently butchering his way through patients in the United States, Patel became Director of Surgery at Bundaberg Base Hospital in Queensland Australia in 2003, where he was linked to at least 87 deaths in two years. Hospital management ignored staff complaints, until nurse Toni Hoffman blew the whistle to a local MP. In 2010 Patel was convicted of manslaughter, but got off with fraud in a retrial. He has been barred from practicing medicine in Australia.

The case of Harold Shipman echoes that of John Bodkin Adams, in that Shipman was also a British GP who dosed elderly patients with narcotics. However, Shipman’s case is less murky, with many of his patients reportedly in good health before he got to them. Shipman forged the will of his final victim, Kathleen Grundy, to make himself sole beneficiary. A well-respected figure, the doctor would have gotten away with it, except that Kathleen Grundy’s daughter contacted the police. In the year 2000, Shipman was convicted of murdering 15 patients, but he might have killed as many as 250. He was sentenced to life in prison, where he hanged himself.

Credited as “the father of lobotomy”, this American physician lobotomized almost 3,500 patients. The barbaric procedure was thought to “cure” mental illness. Traveling across the United States in his “lobotomobile”, Freeman was famous for his ice pick method, in which a metal pick was hammered into the brain through the corners of the eye-sockets. In 1943, he assisted in lobotomizing John F. Kennedy’s sister Rosemary, which her father had arranged without her mother’s consent. Freeman and a colleague scrambled Rosemary’s brain until she became incoherent - reducing her mental capacity to an infant’s for the rest of her life.

Hold onto your stomachs. Our next entries cover some of the most harrowing episodes in history. General and combat medic Shiro Ishii was the Director of Unit 731, a covert Japanese research unit in China during World War II. Under Ishii’s command, researchers experimented on at least 3,000 prisoners. They were subjected to extreme conditions such as frostbite, exposed to biological and chemical weapons, and had their organs removed without anesthetic. Sexual assault was common, with women impregnated to see if diseases transferred to their babies. After the war, the United States gave Ishii and his team immunity in exchange for research data.

Josef Mengele’s name has become synonymous with evil. As a Nazi medical officer in Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust, he became known as “the Angel of Death”. One of Mengele’s most chilling characteristics was his double-sided facade. He would offer sweets to children in the camp’s kindergarten, then select them as subjects for lethal experimentation. Like German gynecologist Carl Clauberg, he conducted forced sterilizations of prisoners. He also amputated limbs, injected chemicals into eyeballs, and once sewed Romani twins back to back. After the war, Mengele escaped justice and lived out the rest of his life in Argentina and Paraguay.