Doctors have always been seen as little gods and lifesavers; yet, it is unfortunate that some have willfully utilized their profession to take the lives of others without giving a hoot. Call them evil doctors or physician killers, yet their atrocities have occurred throughout history.
Here are ten killer doctors who did more harm than good.
Here are the 10 Most Evil Doctors In History
1. Thomas Cream
Thomas Cream was a Scottish-Canadian doctor who killed multiple people across three different countries where he worked. Starting in Ontario, Thomas was first accused of killing a pregnant woman, as a lot of evidence shown, yet he was not charged.
He relocated to Chicago and continued his practice as a medical doctor, and this also saw the deaths of many patients. The mysterious fate these patients suffered called for investigations.
Consequently, he was charged and sentenced to life imprisonment, but this was accompanied by Governor Joseph W. Fife, who is said to have received a bribe from Cream’s brother.
Following this, he fled to London and continued his practice. However, after he was linked to five mysterious people, Cream was arrested and executed in 1892.
2. Jayant Patel
Between 2003 and 2005, Jayant Patel, an Indian-born surgeon, performed several unprofessional surgeries that claimed the lives of many Americans and Australians.
Doctor Death, as many called him, was feared by his colleagues for tearing up patients without prior testing as he lacked knowledge in the field. Some of his colleagues said they watched many patients die but couldn’t stop him. It is even presumed by many that his medical documents were forged.
A typical example is that Jayant once carried out heart surgery on a man without using anesthesia, which left the man screaming until his death. Similarly, he operated on a cancer patient even though she was too weak and left her organs with several punctures, which led to her death.
His undue negligence finally got him arrested in 2010, and he was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter and one of bodily harm. As such, he was sentenced to 7 years of imprisonment.
3. Shiro Ishii
For whatever reason, the doctor and biologist Shiro was fascinated by chemical welfare, and this obsession became worse when he became the leader of the biological weapons division, Unit 731, during World War II.
While past leaders used animals for their experiments, Shiro preferred using humans, which were mostly Chinese prisoners and civilians. He also injected them with diseases such as plague and anthrax, which stimulated strokes and heart attacks, and forced abortions on women without any pain relief, which led to the deaths of thousands.
After his mischief came to light, he was charged with murder and arrested by the American forces. However, following a proposal to give the government his research papers on immunity, he was spared. This was largely because the government was looking for ways to sustain their soldiers without food, water, or medication for a while.
Following this judgment, he served in anonymity for most of his life but died in 1999 at the age of 67 after suffering from throat cancer.
4. H.H Holmes
The New Hampshire native showed great interest in medicine at a very young age and soon started performing surgery on animals. His passion also saw him enroll at the University of Michigan as a medical student; however, this somewhat became a journey of doom and made him America’s first serial killer.
While in school, he would steal corpses, disfigure them, and claim the deaths were accidents in order to make insurance claims on them. After his graduation, he moved to Chicago in 1885 and started working as a pharmacist. It wasn’t long before he killed the owner of the pharmacy and his wife to lay claims against the pharmacy.
At this level, Holmes built a three-story house to execute his plans. It was well structured to leave no traceable clues and had several secret chambers, a torture room, and even an incarea room to get rid of their relatives.
Holmes would later lure his victims into his “Murder Castle,” which was mostly female, with a promise to marry them someday. Well, after taking charge of their finances,
After a few months, he was caught and sentenced to death by hanging in 1896. However, his sentence was linked to the death of his former business partner. Following his conviction, Holmes confessed to having killed at least 27 people, but the authorities never took it seriously since most of the people he mentioned were still alive.
5. Marcel Petiot
The French medical doctor was responsible for at least 60 people during his lifetime, and his victims were mostly Jewish refugees attempting to flee France during the Nazi Germany invasion. As the story goes, Marcel posed as Dr. Eugene, a gateway for creating a route out of the country into Argentina for his victims.
Not only did he deceive them, but he also collected 25 grand francs from them for this course. To dispel them, he would inject them with cyanide, claiming that the Argentinian officials required immunization. Thereafter, he stole their belongings and then disposed of their remains in his basement, either by burning them or dissolving them with quicklime.
This hideous act went on for a while until he was eventually arrested and executed by guillotine in France in 1946.
6. Linda Burfield Hazzard
The American doctor nicknamed “Starvation Doctor” promoted fasting as a treatment for all ailments during the early 20th century. According to her, any disease, from tuberculosis to headaches, can be cured by fasting. She further explained that fasting allows the digestive system to rest and thereby removes impurities from the body.
Unfortunately, she managed to convince a number of patients who died at her state-of-the-art sanitarium in Washington, which a lot of locals call “Starvation Heights.” Not only did she kill at least 40 people, but she also stole from them. She forced a number of upper-class women to sign over the rights to their assets before they died and used the money to expand the Starvation Sanitorium.
What most of her patients didn’t know was that she lacked a medical degree and had only little training as an osteopathic nurse. However, she was licensed to practice medicine in Washington State due to a clause that gave exceptions to practitioners of alternative medicine.
Fortunately, her killings came to a halt after the death of Claire Williamson, a wealthy British socialite who was also a fan of alternative medicine. Following several investigations after Claire’s death, Linda was exposed, arrested, and convicted of manslaughter in 1912. She served two years in prison, and in 1938, she died of starvation.
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7. Carl Clauberg
Carl Clauberg was a German gynecologist who committed atrocities against humanity during the Holocaust. He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of women, mostly Jewish and Romani, in his experiments to develop a sterilization method to be used on mass populations.
Clauberg began his experiments in 1942 at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. He injected women with various chemicals and toxins, including iodine and lye, into their uteruses and ovaries. He also performed surgery on them without anesthesia. Many of the women died from these experiments, and those who survived were often left infertile or with severe health problems.
Clauberg’s experiments were not only cruel and inhumane, but they were also scientifically worthless. He did not keep any accurate records of his experiments, and he often made up results to please his superiors.
After the war, Clauberg was arrested and charged with war crimes. He was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison, but he was released after only nine years. He died in 1957, never having faced justice for his crimes.
8. Michael Swango
Though it is said that he killed three patients, over 60 deaths between 1981 and 1997 have been linked to him. Michael was a former medical doctor from America who started off as an intern at Ohio State University, but nurses couldn’t help but notice how most of his patients died mysteriously.
After he completed an internship, he relocated to Illinois, where he was employed as an EM, and continued his hideous act, but this time he was caught. Michael attempted to kill his colleagues by spicing their coffees with arsenic, which made them violently ill. He was arrested and sentenced to 5 years in prison.
On his release, he fled to Zimbabwe and secured a job at a mission hospital using forged documents. Here also, his patients died mysteriously, and investigations revealed that he had used poisonous chemicals on them. Swango was arrested and charged with multiple murders as well as fraud. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison in 1997.
9. Josef Mengele
better known as the angel of death. Josef Mengele remains the most evil doctor to have ever lived. After receiving his medical degree, he became part of the German Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary organization and later became a volunteer practitioner with their armed force.
However, Mengele soon returned to Germany after sustaining injuries as a medical officer, and so he started working with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics and was later promoted to SS captain in 1943.
Following his new position, he was sent to the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau to serve as the camp’s medical officer. This period also saw him execute inhumane deeds.
Josef started abusing inmates and using children for a number of selfish experiments, including sterilization and shock treatment. He also became very drawn to identical twins, which he tried several experiments on, including trying to change their eyes’ color by injecting dangerous chemicals into their eyeballs.
Apart from this, he would sometimes infect one twin with typhus or some other disease and watch out for the outcome. If one died, he would kill the other to perform comparative postmortem studies.
Josef also transfused the blood of one twin into the other and even performed limb amputations just to satisfy his curiosity about his fantasies.
While some of his victims died during the experiments, others who were left with serious injuries were later killed by him, and their bodies were dissected. Apart from those he inflicted pain on, he also ordered the deaths of patients in hospitals and barracks that were not recovered after 2 weeks.
Following his extremities, he became a wanted war criminal and was sorted after by the Nazi armed force. From 1945 to 1949, Josef lived incognito in the southeast of Germany, where he worked as a farmhand, and later settled in Argentina. However, when the search for him advanced, he moved to Paraguay and later fled to Brazil under the disguised name Wolfgang Gerhard.
Josef died in 1979, and his body was exhumed; he was only identified following DNA analysis.
10. John Bodkin Adams
He was a well-known medical practitioner in the East Sussex seaside town of Eastbourne on the south coast of England, suspected to have killed at least 163 of his patients between 1946 and 1956. Most of his victims were mostly elderly people who were wealthy.
According to several reports, John created a cordial relationship with these people in order to get to know them better and earn their trust. After that, he would find information about their earnings and properties and acquire some of their inheritance. He allegedly assisted them in writing some of their wills while they battled to stay alive. For others, he convinced them to include him in their wills with the hope of managing their resources better.
This was easy through the use of morphine and heroin, which he administered to them via lethal injections. This made his patients linger in a semi-comatose state for several weeks before they died.
Even though John was later caught and arrested, he was only charged for two patients whose deaths were not clear. He was also charged with prescription fraud, falsifying cremation forms, obstructing a police investigation, and failing to keep a dangerous drug registry. Consequently, his image was tarnished, and he lost his medical license to practice but was later allowed to practice after 4 years following two appeals he made.
