{"id":56221,"date":"2025-04-08T06:00:21","date_gmt":"2025-04-08T11:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=56221"},"modified":"2025-04-01T09:46:50","modified_gmt":"2025-04-01T14:46:50","slug":"the-icepick-surgeon-by-sam-kean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/the-icepick-surgeon-by-sam-kean\/","title":{"rendered":"The Icepick Surgeon by Sam Kean"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Some medical “professionals” want to get to hell FAST, and they don\u2019t<\/u> want a layover in DC.\u00a0 In The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Do not even bother going down the rabbit hole of motivation.\u00a0 It sure as hell had nothing to do with the Hippocratic oath.\u00a0 These cretins were motivated by profit, sadism, god complex, or evil just for the sake of evil.\u00a0 Is it permissible to use bodies of the unwitting as your own personal petri dish?\u00a0 Absofrigginlutely not.\u00a0 Did these abominations advance the wheels of science under laboratory conditions that should never be replicated?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0\u00a0 But if your loved one is dying of hypothermia, for example, would you want all Nazi trials stricken from the record?\u00a0 Because those ghouls learned a great deal probing the reaches of human anatomy.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the thinkpiece behind Kean’s work, where we explore operations and experimentation that will just plain make you wince.\u00a0 Looking at you, Mr. Transorbital Lobotomy<\/a>.\u00a0 Of course, the Tuskegee syphilis study gets due treatment.\u00a0 But were you aware of its parallel counterpart study in Guatemala prisons?\u00a0 To simulate transmission in the “wild” it frequently employed alcohol and female practitioners of (ahem) the oldest profession.\u00a0 Its methodology certainly cannot be described in this family blog.<\/p>\n

A doff of the cap is given to their ethically-unencumbered progenitors.\u00a0 As Queen of the Nile, Cleopatra allegedly satiated her intellectual curiosity with an endless supply of slaves.\u00a0 And Dr. Mengele….well, he was just a sadistic war criminal that took copious notes.\u00a0 \u00a0 Thomas Edison had no compunction about sending local hounds to the rainbow bridge, or ripping off Nikola Tesla, for that matter.\u00a0 If you hadn’t deduced already, smart does not equal scrupulous. And success does not concern itself with your posthumous moral judgment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some medical “professionals” want to get to hell FAST, and they don\u2019t want a layover in DC.\u00a0 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[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,1,8],"tags":[3353,2700,676,4346,10036,10035],"class_list":["post-56221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reference","category-staff-picks","tag-medical","tag-experiments","tag-nonfiction","tag-operations","tag-sam-kean","tag-the-icepick-surgeon"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXx-eCN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56221"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56246,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56221\/revisions\/56246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}