Avi Ohry
Tel Aviv, Israel

Several doctors in history achieved notoriety for committing murders or for participating in reigns of terror. They range from the British murderer Hawley Harvey Crippen (1910)¹ to Joel Le Secournec,² convicted in France for crimes against hundreds of victims. The surgeon and historian Dr. John Alexandre Olivier Exmling (or Esquemeling) (1646–1798) ended his career by becoming a robber-buccaneer in the Caribbean islands.¹

Several French physicians were active with the Jacobins during the French Revolution. Choffinhal and Pierre Guillermard (1765–1810) supported the executions of scientific and medical aristocracy. Joseph Ignac Guillotin (1738–1814) improved the louisette, a decapitating device initially designed by the French surgeon and physiologist Antoine Louis (1723–92) and German engineer Tobias Schmidt.² The revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793), later assassinated by Charlotte Corday, was active in political executions.³ Also during the Revolution, a surgeon named Pequel allegedly flayed some thirty dead opponents and sent their skins to a tannery.⁴

Robert Knox (1793–1862), a well-known Scottish anatomist-surgeon, was involved in William Burke and William Hare’s murders of the city’s poor, which supplied bodies to Knox for dissections.⁵ J.M. Barrie’s play The Anatomist and Dylan Thomas’ The Doctor and the Devils immortalized this story.

Pierre Laget (1885–1944) was a physician and dentist in Montpellier, France, whose wife and several other family members died under mysterious circumstances after he returned from World War I. He was convicted of poisoning them and died by suicide in prison.⁶ Another French doctor, Edmond Couty de la Pommerais (1830–1864), also poisoned a few members of his family and was executed.⁷

The American Dr. H.E. Mudgett (1860–1896), also known as H.H. Holmes, seduced rich women to come to his hotel, enticed them to special rooms he where he poured in poisonous gas, and cremated around 200 victims in his basement.⁸ The American surgeon Dr. William Chester Minor (1834–1920), most likely paranoid schizophrenic, spent many years at the Broadmoor Institute of the Insane, where he wrote and sent 12,000 entries for the Oxford English Dictionary.⁹

Azuela Mariano (1873–1952) was a Mexican physician and author who joined Francesco “Pancho” Villa (1878–1923) to rebel against the dictators who ruled in Mexico, who in turn designated him a terrorist.¹⁰ The Argentinian born Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967) , physician and Communist revolutionary fighter, assisted Castro in Cuba and other groups.¹¹ François “Papa Doc” Duvalier (1907–1971) was a Haitian physician-politician who served as his country’s president from 1957–1971. He created an undercover government death squad, the Tonton Macoute, which tortured or killed his opponents.¹²

The list of Nazi doctors and scientists is frighteningly long and well documented.^13-15 Radowan Karadzic was a psychiatrist and Bosnian Serb politician who in 1996 was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal of The Hague for war crimes and genocide in the Bosnian War. Finally, Chenjerai “Hitler” Hunzvi (1949–2001), a physician who served as Chairman of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’ Association of 1997, ran a “clinic” that was a center for interrogation, torture, and killings.¹⁶

References

1. Spicer AR. The buccaneer physicians. Esquemeling, Dover and Wafer. Bull Univ Miami Sch Med Jackson Meml Hosp. 1963 Apr-Jun;17:49-52.
2. Yearsley M. Joseph Ignace Guillotin. Proc R Soc Med. 1915;8(Sect Hist Med):1-6. doi: 10.1177/003591571500801501.
3. Hill O. J.P. Marat’s use of electricity in the practice of medicine. Br J Phys Med. 1957 May;20(5):100-2.
4. Pequel, chirurgien militaire francais…direct’eur de la tannerie de peaux-celles des vende’ens fussilles a Angers en 1793. P 468,’ Larousse Dictionnaires, historique des Me’decins’, Ed. Michel Dupont.1999, France (n 628 p)
5. Neher A. Robert Knox and the anatomy of beauty. Med Humanit. 2011 Jun;37(1):46-50. 
6. Pierre Laget. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Laget
7. Edmond de la Pommerais. Murderpedia. https://mail.murderpedia.org/male.P/p/pommerais-edmond.htm
8. Herman Webster Mudgett (1861-1896). WikiTree. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Mudgett-37
9. Dunea G. Doctor and dictionary. Hektoen International. Winter 2013. https://hekint.org/2017/02/01/doctor-and-dictionary/
10. Ober WB. Mariano Azuela, M.D. (1873-1952), physician and novelist of Mexican Revolution. NY State J Med. 1966 Nov 1;66(21):2828-31.
11. Mora LO, Santamarina BA. Che Guevara: the antihero. N Engl J Med. 1969 Dec 4;281(23):1289-91.
12. Green JC, Schoening A, Vaughn MG. Duvalier Regime in Haiti and Immigrant Health in the United States. Ann Glob Health. 2018 Nov 5;84(4):603-611.
13. Weindling P. Painful and sometimes deadly experiments which Nazi doctors carried out on children. Acta Paediatr. 2022 Sep;111(9):1664-1669.
14. Bruwer A. Thoughts after reading Robert Jay Lifton’s ‘The Nazi Doctors’. Med War. 1989 Oct-Dec;5(4):185-96.
15. Czech H, Hildebrandt S, Reis SP, Chelouche T, et al. Nazism, and the Holocaust: Historical evidence, implications for today, teaching for tomorrow. Lancet. 2023 Nov 18;402(10415):1867-1940.
16. Ohry A, Kugel C. Physicians and terror: The historical perspective. Harefuah. 2005 Feb;144(2):122-5, 149. Hebrew.