5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (13 page)

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GUY FAGON The eighteenth-century resident French physician at the court at Versailles was known as “the killer of princes.” Within fourteen days in 1715, he wiped out almost the entire French royal family by treating a measles epidemic with a tough regime of purges, emetics, and prolonged bleedings. The infant Louis XV survived only because his nurse refused to hand him over to Fagon and hid him. Fagon once advised King Louis XIV to drink nothing but Burgundy for his health.

3

DR. WALTER FREEMAN The professor of neurology at George Washington University invented the

“production line lobotomy,” performed with an ice pick
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and a hammer under local anesthetic. Freeman’s first patient was a sixty-three-year-old woman from Kansas, who had second thoughts upon learning that her curly blond hair would have to be completely shaved off.

Freeman reassured her that she could keep her curls, confident that after the operation she would no longer care. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Freeman lobotomy was performed on more than twenty thousand patients as he toured the U.S. in his specially equipped camper van, his

“Lobotomobile.” His most famous patient was the rebellious Hollywood starlet Frances Farmer, who was subjected to the Freeman lobotomy at the age of just thirty-four; he even had a photo taken of himself performing it.

4

JOHN RICHARD BRINKLEY A small-town doctor working in Milford, Kansas, in the early 1900s, Brinkley believed that he could renew a man’s sex drive by transplanting the sexual glands of a goat into the male scrotum. He persuaded a local farmer to allow him test his theory, and a year after his transplant the farmer’s wife gave birth to a baby boy named “Billy.” For a mere $750, Brinkley offered his services to anyone willing to undergo his surgery, and he found plenty of eager subjects. The first few transplants, using gonads from the odorless Toggenberg breed of goats, were performed without any major hitch. His goat-gland therapy came to the attention of Harry Chandler, owner of the
Los
Angeles Times
, who also underwent Brinkley’s surgery and publicized the technique in his newspaper. The
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publicity made Brinkley famous, but with it also came the unwanted attentions of the California state medical authorities, who quickly revoked his license to practice and began criminal proceedings. In the 1930s, Brinkley hit upon a new radio scam, “Doctor Brinkley’s Medical Question Box.” Listeners were invited to write to him with their health problems and he would prescribe his own treatments on the air. These cures invariably involved his own product line of patent medicines, which for the most part were colored water.

5

ROLANDO SANCHEZ Minutes before going into surgery to have his gangrenous right foot amputated in February 1995, the fifty-one-year-old diabetic William King joked with the staff at the University Community Hospital in Tampa, Florida, “Make sure you don’t take the wrong one.” King awoke to discover that surgeon Rolando Sanchez had inadvertently removed his left foot, leaving the gangrenous foot intact. He subsequently had both legs amputated below the knee and settled with the surgeon for $250,000. Later, the hospital revealed that it had implemented a new system to make sure that such a ghastly accident could never be repeated: In the future, the word “no” would be written in marker pen on all limbs that were not to be amputated.

6

DR. THEODORE MORELL Morell was Adolf Hitler’s personal doctor from the mid-1930s onward. Hitler was prone to temper tantrums that became worse as World War II went on, prompting his subordinates to nickname him “carpet biter.” These mood swings were exacerbated
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by a variety of minor ailments, including stomach cramps and chronic insomnia, which Morell treated with a regimen of twenty-eight separate medications, including some mercury-lead compounds known to cause mental deterioration, and Dr. Köster’s anti-gas pills, a mysterious mixture of strychnine and belladonna. Morell also prescribed “golden” tablets containing huge amounts of caffeine and the highly addictive amphetamine pervitin, large doses of which are known to cause disorientation, hallucinations, convulsions, and coma. In September 1940, Hitler threatened to bomb England with one thousand tons of explosives. He later amended the figure to five tons because the original quantity, arrived at under the influence of Morell’s pills, struck him as excessive on reflection. The physician who replaced Morell, Dr. Geising, found that Hitler had been cumulatively poisoned over a period of many years by a variety of drugs in a “truly horrifying concentration.”

Geising, however, was not entirely blameless: In 1944, he treated a cold with a 10-percent cocaine solution, and in Hitler’s last days gave him large quantities of cocaine drops for an eye complaint.

7

SIR WILLIAM ARBUTHNOT LANE This surgeon

of Guy’s Hospital, London, was responsible for possibly the most painfully misguided medical mistake of the twentieth century, surgical removal of the colon. Lane’s life was dominated by two great passions, ballroom dancing and the condition of the human bowel. The latter, he believed, was the seat of all known medical
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problems. Lane advised his patients to oil their colons daily with a pint of cream and to sleep flat on their stomachs, and made the remarkable claim that red-haired women were naturally immune to constipation. In 1903, he made the breakthrough “discovery” that the human colon was useless, merely an unnecessary tube of tissue and muscle full of nasty smells. Lane set about testing his hypothesis by ridding the world of colons.

Patients who came to see him for minor ailments had their colons removed and tossed into the incinerator as a matter of routine. Before long his theory became fashionable and surgeons all over the world agreed that the humble colon was responsible for a whole range of diseases including cancer and tuberculosis. The fad lasted for about ten years before Lane’s work was widely discredited.

8

SIR JAMES CLARKE Queen Victoria spent much of her reign in the hands of this mysteriously incompetent court physician, a man once described as “not fit to attend a sick cat.” Clarke was involved in a court scandal when one of the queen’s young unmarried ladies-in-waiting got sick with a swollen stomach, which convinced several people, including the queen herself, that she was pregnant. To prove her innocence, Miss Hastings agreed to a humiliating internal examination by the queen’s doctor. Clarke reported that although he could not find evidence of pregnancy, he could see no other good reason for her swollen stomach. Then he produced a bizarre medical statement that concluded that
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although the lady in waiting was still a virgin, that didn’t necessarily mean she was not pregnant: He had come across a few cases in his time, he explained to the queen, of pregnant virgins. The truth became evident a few months later when the girl died in agony from a tumor on her liver. Clarke’s career should have been terminated, but the queen retained his services, and when her husband Prince Albert became ill in November 1861, Dr. Clarke was on hand to assure both the prime minister and the queen that Albert was suffering from no more than a nasty cold and there was absolutely no need for concern. Within six weeks the prince was dead.

9

EDWARD BODKIN In 1999, this fifty-six-year-old resident of Huntingdon, Indiana, was arrested and charged with performing unlicensed surgery after he had removed the testicles of at least five men. He was about to castrate a sixth when the patient panicked and handed over to police a videotape Bodkin had lent him of some of the operations. Most of the testicles were recovered from several small jars in Bodkin’s apartment, each labeled with the dates of the procedures, the subjects’

initials, and either an “L” or an “R.” Bodkin admitted castrating his clients for free in exchange for the right to videotape the operation, and to selling the films for $75

each. His discount gelding service improved with practice; at first, he used an art knife, manicure scissors, a curved needle, and rusty needle-nosed pliers, but by the last castration, he was using surgical equipment purchased from a veterinary supply company and an
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anesthetic. When asked to comment on the patients’

motives, state prosecutor John Branham said, “I can’t sit here as a reasonable human being and give you an intelligent answer to that.”

10

DR. HAROLD SHIPMAN A GP from Hyde, near Manchester, England, Shipman was sentenced in 2000 to fifteen life sentences for the murder of fifteen patients, fourteen female and one male, by diamorphine injection.

An inquest later concluded that Shipman was probably responsible for as many as 297 suspicious deaths during the twenty-four years he practiced in Hyde, including eight patients in one street alone. His victims were mostly elderly, single women who gave Shipman the privacy he needed to administer lethal injections during home visits. No motive was ever offered for the murders, but psychiatric reports suggest that Shipman simply enjoyed watching people die. He was found hanged in his prison cell four years into his sentence. An inquest in 2005 attributed even more deaths to Shipman, carried out during his time as a junior doctor, bringing the estimated total of murders to about 350.

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I Hav10

e a Little List:

Ten Deformities

of the Famous

1

MOSES A reluctant public speaker who described himself as “heavy of mouth,” he had a major speech impediment and probably suffered from a cleft lip and palate. In Exodus 6:12, Moses describes himself as having

“uncircumcised lips.”

2

ANNE BOLEYN She had six fingers on her left hand and three nipples. If King Henry VIII’s divorce petition had failed, he planned to use the extra digit and supernumerary nipple as evidence that she was a witch.

3

MARSHAL CHARLES MAURICE

DE TALLEYRAND The French revolutionary

and statesman had a deformed leg, the result of being dropped by his nurse.

4

KING RICHARD III He was the subject of a number of colorful inventions. According to one, he was born with a full set of teeth and with hair down to his waist.

His famous hunchback was also probably invented by his enemies; no portrait, suit of armor, or contemporary description attests to it.

5

LORD BYRON The Romantic poet was born with a clubfoot, which he later attributed to his mother’s tight corsets.

6

NAPOLEON The emperor had hemicryptorchidism—

one undescended testicle.

7

KAISER WILHELM II His left arm was stunted and withered, the result of a complicated breech birth.

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8

JOSEPH STALIN His left foot had webbed toes and his left arm was shorter than his right.

9

JOSEF GOEBBELS He was born with a left leg three inches longer than his right. According to the official version it was the result of a childhood illness; the possibility that one of the architects of the Nazi movement had a genetic defect didn’t sit well with the prevailing ideology.

10

ADOLF HITLER According to Soviet medical reports, he did indeed have only one ball. According to Eva Braun, Hitler’s testicular damage was the result of

“a boyhood mishap” with a wild alpine goat.

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Ten 10

Bad Hair Days

1

Mary Queen of Scots was bald, a secret she hid from even her closest acquaintances with a thick auburn wig.

The fact that Mary was follically challenged became horribly clear on the day of her execution. The executioner picked up her decapitated head by the hair to show it to the crowd and her wig came away in his hand.

2

In 1993, a twenty-two-year-old Dutchman went on a rampage that caused $60,000 damage to a barbershop in Hengelo. He was upset because the barber had overdone his request for “a slight trim.”

3

In 1994, hundreds of Uruguayans sued a local shampoo manufacturer after using the patent dandruff treatment Dander-Ban. Within hours of using the shampoo they all became completely bald.

4

In March 1983, Danish hair-fetishist Luigi Longhi was jailed for life after he was found guilty of kidnapping and murdering a female German hitchhiker. Longhi admitted he’d washed her hair four times before strangling her.

5

In 1966, Michael Potkul won a $400,000 malpractice award against surgeon Dominic Brandy in Pittsburgh after Brandy promised Potkul a new head of hair. He achieved this by grabbing the hairy scalp at the back of Potkul’s head and stretching it over the bald bit on top.

Potkul became depressed after six unsuccessful operations to correct the problem and attempted suicide.

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6

The composer Gioacchino Rossini suffered from alopecia in his later years, which made him completely bald. He took to wearing a wig; in exceptionally cold weather, however, he wore two or three wigs simultaneously.

7

In 1994, Ernestine and John Kujan sued the New York dog-grooming salon Pet Pavilion after watching their cocker spaniel Sandy accidentally bake to death in an automatic blow dryer.

8

In 1996, California hairdresser Joseph Middleton was sentenced to sixty days of community service. Middleton had masturbated with his free hand while doing a female customer’s hair. At his trial, the court heard that he had been able to finish both jobs because the customer was too frightened to object.

9

The Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha banned beards and long hair, even on visiting foreigners. Albanian border barbers were employed to snip excess hair from all foreigners entering the country; the degree of hairiness was then noted in police files.

10

Henry Ford always washed his hair in water containing rusty razor blades, in the belief that rusty water was a hair restorer.