The shocking story of Dr. Michael Swango, who, despite being a convicted felon suspected of murdering dozens of his patients, was allowed to practice medicine. Best-selling author Stewart (Den of Thieves, 1991, etc.) brings us inside the life of a killer who thrived in a medical establishment where doctors typically cover up for other doctors, where hospital administrators live in constant fear of litigation, and where regulatory agencies don’t share crucial information. At Southern Illinois University’s medical school, Swango kept to himself, but classmates noticed that patients who came into contact with him tended to die. After graduating, Swango got a prestigious medical internship at Ohio State University. In February 1984 at Ohio State, patient Ruth Barrick died immediately after Swango treated her. Later a nurse saw Swango injecting a patient with a syringe; the patient almost died. The nurse who accused Swango was ignored and, in a pattern that would repeatedly benefit Swango, other doctors circled the wagons to defend their colleague. As more patients died, Ohio State initiated an in-house investigation, led by a fellow doctor, that fully exonerated Swango. Hospital administrators refused to even reprimand him, because they “didn’t want to be sued by Swango as a result of unfounded charges and nurses’ gossip.” When his internship was up, Swango worked as a paramedic in his hometown of Quincy, Ill. He related fantasies to his co-workers about killing people. When Swango brought in donuts, his co-workers got sick. After a few more poisonings, Swango was arrested and convicted. A felon, he nonetheless went on to practice medicine in South Dakota, New York, and Africa. In each place, patients died mysteriously under Swango’s care. Finally, upon his return from Africa, the FBI arrested the young doctor for falsifying medical records. He’s currently in prison, but could be released within three years. Although Stewart writes skillfully about the medical establishment’s unforgivable “code of silence,” he never quite succeeds in taking us very far into Swango’s warped mind. Thus, we—re left to guess about his psychotic motives and thought processes.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85484-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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