Killer doctors
abc.net.au
What attracts such people to a profession intended to save lives? Humphry Osmond, in his classic paper “God and the Doctor” wrote of the three qualities that embody the medical role: authority, sapience and charisma. Charisma occurs to a varying degree, sapience is a debatable quotient, but the authoritarian doctor who succumbs to fatal hubris is a killer on the loose. One writer who knew about this was Franz Kafka, who had a day job as an insurance claims assessor.
Serial killers are born, not made; they flourish in conditions that facilitate their access to ideal victims. Medical serial killers do not seek the usual goals of sex or money, rather power over life or death.
One attitude shared by Shipman, Swango and Patel was an unremitting grandiosity, a sense that they were above the people they cared for, literally supermen. The only psychiatrist to examine Shipman described him as a necrophile, relishing his role in determining the impromptu and unwitting fate of his patients. Patel may not have been a practitioner of picqueurism, gaining pleasure from cutting flesh or removing body parts, but was surely following the well trodden course of a medico with an overweening belief in his own superiority. |
