From a fertility doctor who was secretly impregnating his patients to a doctor who removed his own appendix without anaesthetics, we count nine doctors you won’t believe are real!
9 – Dr Cecil Jacobson,
- Over the years fertility doctor Cecil Jacobson helped hundreds of couples realise their dream of falling pregnant. Unfortunately he was very deceptive about how he did this. You see, his patients believed they were falling pregnant using sperm supplied by screened donors, but Dr Jacobson was actually impregnating them with his own sperm.
- To cover this up he falsified pregnancies and lied to patients about how far along they were. An investigation determined that there was no sperm donor program, and that Jacobson had personally fathered as many as seventy-five children.
- He was convicted in 1992 and had his medical licence revoked. Jacobson had to pay $117,000 in fines and serve five years in prison. But this was a very lenient sentence, as he could’ve gotten a 280-year sentence and a $500,000 fine. His story became the basis for the TV movie ‘The Babymaker’.
8 – Dr Mladen Antolic,
- As a pain management physician, Dr Mladen Antolic had the authority to write prescriptions for cocaine, morphine, oxycodone and methamphetamines. But instead of using these prescriptions to help patients he decided he would use them to blackmail patients for sex and money.
- First, he falsely prescribed addictive drugs to his female patients. When they got hooked, he invited them to lavish parties and forced them to give him sexual favours in exchange for a drug hit.
- This went on for years until one patient exposed him with an anonymous letter to the DEA. He was arrested in 2010 and had his medical licence suspended. Although he faced 156 years jail time for his crimes, he only served ten years in prison – because apparently doctors are untouchable?
7 – Dr Linda Burfield Hazzard,
- Linda Burfrield Hazzard never went to medical school. But she didn’t let a pesky little detail like that stop her from illegally treating patients. She was even granted a medical licence in the early 1900s because of a weird loophole in Washington
- As you can imagine, a licence and no training was a recipe for disaster – especially when Linda’s medical philosophy was ‘no need to run tests; fasting cures all ailments’. Whenever patients came in Linda would prescribe strict diets of tomato and asparagus broth. It didn’t matter if they had a fever or a gunshot wound, Linda genuinely believed that fasting would heal any illness.
- Unfortunately most of Linda’s patients ended up starving to death under this so-called ‘treatment plan’. She effectively killed more forty patients this way without facing any charges. Locals came to nickname her treatment facility ‘Starvation Heights’ because all of the patients admitted were nothing but skin and bones. She was finally arrested in 1911 and even tried to have her charges dismissed as sexism.
6 – Dr Lidia Soto,
- In 2011, Mexican street vendor Karla Flores was taking a stroll in the street when a live grenade struck her in the face and became lodged there. Karla was rushed to the Mexican Culiacan General Hospital but, since there was a real risk of the grenade exploding, no one wanted to treat her.
- When the news of Karla’s predicament reached Dr Lidia Soto she bravely volunteered to perform the grenade removal surgery. Because a detonation would kill anyone in a 32-foot radius the operation had to be performed outside in a field. Bomb defusal experts from the Mexican army were on site to give Lidia instructions.
- After hours of steady hands and crossed fingers, Lidia successfully removed the grenade, saving Karla from certain death. Definitely not your typical day at the office.