Medical Blunders: Amazing True Stories of Mad, Bad, and Dangerous Doctors

by IanSchott (Author), RobertM.Youngson (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1999

  $41.59

  A doctor removes the normal, healthy side of a patient's brain instead of the malignant tumor. A man whose leg is scheduled for amputation wakes up to find his healthy leg removed. These recent examples are part of a history of medical disasters and embarrassments as old as the profession itself. In Medical Blunders, Robert M. Youngson and Ian Schott have written the definitive account of medical mishap in modern and not-so- modern times. Youngson and Schott cover the gamut of medical accidents, from famous quacks to curious forms of sexual healing, from blunders with the brain to drugs worse than the diseases they are intended to treat. In Medical Blunders, we find shamefully dangerous doctors, human guinea pigs, masturbation treated as a disease requiring treatment, and the legendary surgeon who was himself a craven morphine addict. The resulting picture is one which depicts medical mistakes that are incredible, misguided, arrogant, cruel, or stupendously wrong-headed. Exploring the line between the comical and the tragic, the honest mistake and the intentional crime, Medical Blunders illustrates once and for all that doctors are subject to the same political, social, historical, and personal pressures as the rest of humanity.

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $3.36

  This is a collection of stories about medical blunders in the past and in modern life. The stories are of acts of arrogance, ignorance, cruelty and stupidity. They include tales of: a labotomy without anaesthetic, female mutilation, secret experiments on criminals, the insane and cancer patients, sex-changes, the doctors who become surgery addicts, wonder drugs with nightmare side-effects, the euthanasia experts, and chloroform orgasms.