Doctors who Kill

Behind the authority of a white coat, a hospital badge or the promise of treatment lies one of society's most powerful forms of trust.Doctors Who Kill examines six disturbing cases in which that trust became part of the crime.From Michael Swango, the American physician who repeatedly found his way back into medicine despite mounting warnings, to Marcel Petiot in occupied Paris, Victorian poisoner Thomas Neill Cream, Russian doctor Maxim Petrov, Italian emergency physician Leonardo Cazzaniga and fasting practitioner Linda Hazzard, these cases span more than a century of medicine and murder.Drawing on court decisions, official records, contemporary reporting and archival sources, Christopher Byron follows the evidence behind each case: the deaths and disappearances, the suspicions that emerged, the investigations that followed and the failures that sometimes allowed danger to continue.But this is not a collection of inflated body counts or sensationalised legends. Convictions are separated from allegations. Confessions are distinguished from independently established evidence. Where the historical record remains uncertain, that uncertainty remains part of the story-an approach the book establishes explicitly in its source methodology.