Kaplan, R. M. (2009) Medical Murder: disturbing cases of doctors who kill. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.

 Kaplan, R. M. (2009) Medical Murder: disturbing cases of doctors who kill. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.

 

Summary

'Medicine contains within it the seeds of its own destruction - the power over both life, and death. … Doctors have been leading participants in state mass murder, from the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust to the Bosnian War. Far from being unique exceptions medical murder, or clinicide, has a long history in the profession. … (Kaplan) explores the phenomenon of murder by medical malice to show that while medicine is an inherently safe practice, there must be continual vigilance to detect those doctors who exploit the shadowy line between life and death to meet their own twisted pathological needs.'

 

My comments

In this book, Kaplan aimed to build a sociology of 'medical murder' on the basis of four major 'cases' - Drs. Swango, Shipman, Bailey and Adams. Each case is so different from the other three that no general conclusions can be drawn from them all, undermining any notion of a sociology of 'medical murder'.

 

Kaplan stretches the meaning of 'medical murder' to breaking point by lumping together his four core doctors (who killed in general practice or hospitals) and doctors who collaborated with state-sanctioned genocide, such as the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide and the Serbs' 'ethnic cleansing' of the Bosnians. He does this while showing that the motives of Swango et al. were definitively different from those of practitioners of state-sanctioned murder. Further, in two instances - Joseph Mengele in the Holocaust and Radovan Karadzic in Bosnia - Kaplan tries to explain state policies in terms of individual doctors' actions, reducing social phenomena to individuals' actions.

 

Much of the book relies on assertion, rather than evidence and it's not good enough for Kaplan to claim that including references and sources would have made the book 'unfriendly to the reader' and turned it 'from a user-friendly edition to an academic tome.' (p. 201). Throughout the book, Kaplan blurs evidence and opinion, especially in the final chapter, where Kaplan equates 'ethics' and 'political correctness' (p. 196) and asserts that prosecutors of medical malpractice often have, 'an ideological, consumer-driven agenda …' (p. 198), offering no evidence or even substantiation.

 

Finally, the text needs significant editing. There are several proof-reading errors and the language is at times awkward and ungrammatical and border on the incoherent. Just two examples: Kaplan refers to 'the morally tendentious "Nuremberg defence"', but doesn't explain it; and ends his book thus: 'Consider this statement … After Shipman, there is no satisfactory answer to that question.' (p. 198. Emphases added.)