Some medical “professionals” want to get to hell FAST, and they don’t want a layover in DC. In The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science, we learn about several all-time recipients of that direct flight. This book by Sam Kean is a compilation of unethically gleaned (albeit semi-useful) human medical knowledge.
Do not even bother going down the rabbit hole of motivation. It sure as hell had nothing to do with the Hippocratic oath. These cretins were motivated by profit, sadism, god complex, or evil just for the sake of evil. Is it permissible to use bodies of the unwitting as your own personal petri dish? Absofrigginlutely not. Did these abominations advance the wheels of science under laboratory conditions that should never be replicated? Yes. But if your loved one is dying of hypothermia, for example, would you want all Nazi trials stricken from the record? Because those ghouls learned a great deal probing the reaches of human anatomy.
That’s the thinkpiece behind Kean’s work, where we explore operations and experimentation that will just plain make you wince. Looking at you, Mr. Transorbital Lobotomy. Of course, the Tuskegee syphilis study gets due treatment. But were you aware of its parallel counterpart study in Guatemala prisons? To simulate transmission in the “wild” it frequently employed alcohol and female practitioners of (ahem) the oldest profession. Its methodology certainly cannot be described in this family blog.
A doff of the cap is given to their ethically-unencumbered progenitors. As Queen of the Nile, Cleopatra allegedly satiated her intellectual curiosity with an endless supply of slaves. And Dr. Mengele….well, he was just a sadistic war criminal that took copious notes. Thomas Edison had no compunction about sending local hounds to the rainbow bridge, or ripping off Nikola Tesla, for that matter. If you hadn’t deduced already, smart does not equal scrupulous. And success does not concern itself with your posthumous moral judgment.
