Medical Blunders

Summary: History is full of blunders and mistakes, most by well meaning people. How could doctors justify eugenics, death camps, horrific experiments without consent, and lethal injections with the Hippocratic Oath? Is the Oath even valid today, even in it's changed form. This paper will cover some of the worst medical errors and misjudgments in history. Hopefully after you read this, you will begin to understand how such errors were made. The flaws in our system today that lead to so many litigations and blunders by doctors. The harm done by the quacks even in the not to distant future. And you will understand how something like Lobotomies and treatments with x-rays could be justified. You will learn about the negative affects of medical dogma. And you will realize that such mistakes could easily happen again. The only way to fight it is by educating yourself, and realzing that doctors are human, just as we all are.

Katie Militello - Medical Blunders

History is full of medical errors and bad science, often with fatal results. Doctors did the best they could with what they knew and tried their best to save their patients. Many procedures had no benefits at all, but doctors stuck to the same dogma in the vain hope of a cure. Although they tried their best to stick to the Hippocratic Oath, most failed miserably. Great harm was done by healers who meant well, sometimes worse then the quacks and frauds. Even now, when doctors have many more tools in their arsenal, mistakes are still rampant. We should not fault these all too human healers struggling to do battle against disease.

A survey in England done at Sheffield University found that doctors sometimes did not alert the coroners of deaths caused by their inability to diagnose the cause. Only 2 out of 3 cases that required referrals were actually identified by doctors. When 200 doctors were questioned, the least often properly diagnosed deaths were those caused by medical treatment. Only 53 percent of heart attacks were diagnosed properly and nearly half were cases belonging to cardiologists. Out of the top five reasons that doctors are sued by patients, three are because of failure to diagnoses illness, the first being failure to diagnose cancer.

When American hospitals were studied there was a 13.1 to 15.6 percent error rate . The errors given ranged from defective equipment to not enough contact with the patient. Bad handwriting was also a major cause. A study by David and Cohen found that it was the most frequent cause of medical error with a stunning 58% of doctor’s notes on hospital charts being illegible. This is especially dangerous because there is a big difference between .8 milligrams and .8 milliliters, and because many drugs sound alike.

Doctors today sometimes have a reputation for being cold or uncaring. There are many reasons for this. Part of this is the view of science as being purely logical and unfeeling. Part of this is because of the history of medicine. The fact is that doctors are humans and can make mistakes. When they are overstressed by long sleepless hours, little food, and far too many patients, the number of mistakes grows. Hospitals now are simply too crowded with patients, all clamoring for attention . How can doctors give patients the attention they deserve when they are forced to see patient after patient? They are encouraged to see as many patients as possible, like an assembly line. Haste can lead to mistakes.

More importantly, patients may find themselves turning to alternative medicine, which does not work, in search of a little warmth and personal attention . Alternative medicine is in fact a huge industry. An American study of 660 cancer patients found that over half were using alternative methods . Even though the line between doctors and quacks is no longer blurred, quacks still flourish. Ancient mysticism had crossed with modern technology to create a hybrid monster.


Gone are the days when doctors knew their patients and visited them at home. For some illnesses proper diagnosis can be made only if they are familiar with the patient’s life. For example, doctors may misdiagnose physical illness as mental illness because they are not familiar enough with their patient’s lifestyle. At one psychiatric center in Manhattan, researchers found that a large percent, 75 percent in fact, of the patients had been misdiagnosed.


Once put on drugs, the patient may be so changed that it is hard to separate symptom from side effect. Antibiotics are also overused, leading to so called super bugs by allowing them to increase their resistance to antibiotics . Caesarians, x-rays, ultrasounds, antibiotics, and other tests and treatments given by doctors ‘just in case’ in an effort to avoid litigation adds up to 15.1 billion dollars a year. Three to six million surgeries a year are unnecessary. The most common surgeries affect women – such as caesarians and hysterectomies. It is still a large improvement on Victorian medicine during which hysteria, disobedience, and masturbation was a disease worthy of a clitoridectomy .

Youngman and Schott note that:

“...Whereas predominantly male surgeons balk at the thought of whipping off a testicle, they have less empathy with women and few qualms about excising an ovary .”

If the patient is extremely unlucky, they may catch a nosocomial infection, an infection caught in a hospital. Up to ten percent of all hospitalized patients develop such an infection, and 100,000 patients die each year from those infections.


Doctors do try and take detailed medical history so they know any information relevant to making a diagnosis. But patients sometimes leave critical pieces of information out. Doctors may not ask the right questions. Patients do not know what is relevant or not, or may be afraid to bother the doctor. When Thalidomide was discovered to be causing birth defects in babies it was because eventually doctors realized that the mothers has been on the drug under varying names . Because they had thought it safe, indeed in some countries it was sold over the counter, they had not thought to mention they had been taking the drug. The truth only came out when they were pushed for answers.

Despite the changes in practice throughout the decades most doctors still try and follow the Hippocratic Oath, although it has been updated. The Hippocratic Oath is in a sense the backbone of the medical profession. Written long ago in the time of Ancient Greece, it exists today as still one of the most sacred oaths a doctor takes. Its usage has increased to nearly 100% , but it is radically different from the binding contract of oath used in days long past. It has been modernized to fit the needs of today’s doctors. Some of the changes are beneficial. For instance, the classical version of the oath states that “I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work. ” It is important to remember that before the discovery of bacteria any sort of surgery was nearly always fatal. The classic version of the oath also mentions confidentiality, something still held sacred today. Hospitals take the privacy of their patients very seriously. The Oath also reminds doctors that passing on any knowledge gained is essential, something that was unheard of in the early days when healers guarded their secrets jealously.

Many changes have been made to the classical version in an effort to keep it relevant. Only a small percentage of modern oaths forbid sexual relations with a patient, and a relatively small percent forbids abortions. Both were vehemently forbidden by the original oath. The modern oath states that, “I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug ” Modern doctors are encouraged to be human, as warm as possible. This is a divergence for early day when they were encouraged to keep patients ignorant, demand total obedience, and act aloof. By keeping it mystical, such doctors could keep patients under their thumb without admitting that there was very little that the doctor could do for their patients.

It was observed that physicians tried to avoid treating fatal cases, as it did tend to put them in a bad light. The concept of informed consent was virtually unknown to physicians; instead they were encouraged to keep quiet for the patient’s benefit. This also meant that doctors covered up their ignorance. Youngson and Schott put it this way:

A doctor’s right to judge what is right for his or her own patients to know, and to lie accordingly, is called ‘therapeutic beneficence ”.

Doctors would justify their lies by pointing out that what patients think can have a powerful effect on how they feel. The placebo effect is well known and well documented, and real endorphins are released into the bloodstream.

How, one may wonder, could the oath be reconciled with the barbaric medical practices in history? Some questions are easier to answer then others. In the case of euthanasia, both sides are divided. But only 14% of all modern oaths forbid euthanasia, as stated by a 1993 survey. The American Medical Association is against physicians participating in lethal injections, but eighty percent of physicians surveyed said they would participate in at least one of the forbidden actions . Over half said they would participate in more of these ethics code violating actions.

One of the worst examples of medicine allowing shameful practices can be seen around the time of World War II. When one hears the words eugenics and experiments without consent, the first thought that may come to mind is death camps, sterilizations, and Nazi Germany. How had doctors allowed such a thing to go on, much less aided the efforts? How could the doctors have possibly justified the experiments that went on? The fact of the matter is that Nazis weren’t the only ones who participated in such studies.

Moreover they believed that they were doing the right thing. Those who disagreed frantically continued working, and tried not to think about it. Americans became fascinated by the thought of keeping blood pure, in essence they were racists who meant well. Once Germany began to slide down the long slope that ended in death camps, they thanked the Americans who had given them the data they needed. The eugenics movement began in England, and led to one of the most horrifying events in history.

At Nuremburg, when Nazi doctors had done many fatal tests, they justified their actions by pointing out that the people tested were condemned criminals. Dr. Fritz Klein had been approached and asked how he could justify his actions with the Hippocratic Oath. He replied:
Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind .

If such barbaric acts could be justified because the ‘patients’ were condemned criminals or prisoners of war, suddenly it becomes easier to understand how American doctors could justify their actions. It is because such travesties can happen that those at Nuremburg discouraged such specious reasoning.

In America, even after World War II, experiments on criminals, the dying, and the mentally ill continued. The old and dying, such as cancer patients, were considered suitable for research since they were stable and could not move. After Nuremburg, when Nazis were tried for crimes during the war, the precedents for medicine were set. Nonetheless the number of experiments grew, this time with greedy doctors finding ways to twist the concept of ‘informed consent.’ Prisoners were manipulated into agreeing, or not informed at all. More frightening was the fact that Nuremburg had prevented this precisely because they foresaw how such reasoning had lead to the Nazi experiments.

In 1962 mentally handicapped and juvenile delinquents were used in a dangerous and near deadly experiments involving medicine that caused liver damage. That they were becoming jaundiced was not off-putting in the least for the doctors. In one notorious case 400 black men had syphilis induced without being told. In 1943 sailors were forced into mustard gas testing, to try and come up with more effective clothing. Gas was never used during the way, but hundreds were harmed.

Looking back at history, we can see errors or judgment and deceptions that took the lives of numerous patients. They had wanted a cure, but what they got were hastened deaths. Bloodletting thrived when knowledge of human anatomy was almost nonexistent. Since dissections were forbidden, doctors had to fly blind based on what they knew. Many doctors in ancient times until quite recently prescribed drugs that did more harm then good. And it’s not just drugs given that can cause harm, quite a number of treatments were monstrously lethal. Mercury, which is deadly, as a treatment for Syphilis, and bloodletting are two well known treatments that killed in earlier days.

Those who were bled were ill, and needed all the help they could get. Removing vital oxygen carrying cells from the body seems absurd to the modern mind. The belief was that excess of blood could cause certain types of illness, because they were caused by an imbalance of the humors . Excess of blood meant the person had a sanguine temperament. This entirely fictitious concept was advocated starting with Hippocrates and was popular well into the 18th and 19th centuries . Bloodletting, called phlebotomy was responsible for the death of George Washington. More frightening is the fact that the practice still flourishes today in India . One wonders why the practice was not questioned earlier. Not only was it proven not to work but many patients had their deaths hastened.

Before there were drugs to treat mental illness hospitals were overcrowded and desperate. Many patients would by today’s standards be considered healthy; others would be treated with drugs. In the early days of medicine anyone with epilepsy or depression could be hospitalized by their family, put away where they would not have to deal with them. The mentally ill were assumed to be dangerous, but not intelligent. They were generally kept in conditions worse then most livestock.

Shock treatments such as insulin coma became the only treatments available. Patients were injected with insulin overdose and lapsed into comas. They would then be revived with glucose, hopefully before they died. These treatments paved the way for lobotomies. Used for anyone who was unruly, lobotomies made patients docile and calm. For patients with extreme anxiety this was a benefit for those tending to them. The ice pick lobotomy left no scars, was quick and simple, and could be done fast without proper surgical equipment. The frontal lobes were severed, thus eliminating the problem, and possible anything resembling personality . Though barbaric, there were no medicines to help patients and lobotomies did work sometimes, but it was not a cure it was a way of making patients manageable. Youngson and Schott described it as a “permanent straitjacket on the mind ”.

Medical dogma meant that even though scientists had already given well-reasoned proof that germs caused illness, they had to fight hard to receive acceptance. The idea that germs could cause disease was not the only thing some people had a hard time swallowing. Thousands of men died at sea even after the discovery that vitamin C prevented scurvy because the lordships decided to ignore the evidence presented. Fracastoro had discovered that Bubonic plague, responsible before for the deaths of many, was contagious. His advice was inexcusably ignored.

In 1846 hospitals still followed the teachings of Galen, advocate of bloodletting. A young doctor named Semmelweiss investigated a notorious maternity ward in which nearly all the patients admitted contracted a fatal case of childbed fever. What was notable was that women who came after her infant was born were likely to not become ill. A professor who had cut his finger in the middle of an autopsy had died of symptoms identical to those of the unfortunate mothers. Semmelweiss reasoned that the students doing the autopsies were somehow transferring the fever to the women in the ward. Semmelweiss made his students disinfect their hands before deliveries and the number of cases dropped, until Semmelweiss was fired. Although he tried to continue research he eventually deteriorated into mental illness and later died. Fourteen years later a famed doctor was scheduled to speak at a lecture in which he thoroughly denounced Semmelweiss’s ideas. He was interrupted by a man who proceeded to tell the audience that he had discovered the bacterium responsible for childbed fever. That man was Louis Pasteur .

It isn’t just the quacks that can cause harm however; even educated doctors have made incredible errors of judgment. With this case it was well meaning doctors using new cures that resulted in harm to those they were trying to cure. When X-rays were first discovered by Rontgen, their discoverer foresaw that medicine would see it come into use as a useful tool. Though he did recognize the value of what he had found it was the companies that saw that they could profit from this newly discovered ray. X-Rays became a sort of novelty item, for example shoe shops would have them installed so people could watch shoes being fitted on their feet. In the medical field they were used less as a diagnostic tool and more like a cure-all, like something out of the days of quacks. Although the possibility that these rays could cause damage was known to those who had been frequently exposed and despite the warnings by more careful colleagues, many doctors used them recklessly.

Infants, children, and adults were treated for illnesses ranging from the simple ills, like birthmarks and acne to the more complex, such as shoulder pain and enlarged thyroid. These were not just treatments asked for by a gullible public buying from quacks and charlatans, these were treatments advocated in a good quantity of textbooks. And they were used even as late as 1960. X-rays are prescribed gingerly, as we now know the effects. Since it was known that these rays could remove cancer and tumors, living cells, the medical population should have worked out that healthy cells would be damaged as well. Youngson and Schott estimate that thousands of patients suffered from these treatments. They mention that:

“Today, most doctors are unaware of the extent of this terrible blunder. Older physicians, aware that no present-day doctor would dream of using such treatments, tend to forget, or repress the memory of, how confidently they would once, as young professionals, have recommended them. ”

One blunder was discovered too late to save the vision of many of its tiny victims. In 1940 it became common for premature babies to be given large quantities to oxygen, mainly because their lungs were poorly developed. Improvements in neonatal care had improved the outlook for many premature babies. Normal air is made up of 78.08% Nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen , and about 1 percent is made up of trace elements like helium, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, etc. In the incubators they could receive air with up to 70% oxygen. During this time cases of blinded babies began to crop up in hospitals, baffling doctors. What was especially puzzling was that the better the facilities a hospital had the more cases it seemed to find, with badly equipped hospitals having no cases whatsoever. The blindness causing growth discovered was called retrolental fibroplasia, which in layman’s terms means a growth behind the lens.

At first doctors thought that it might be a lack of oxygen, so the percentages were increased which caused the number of cases to rise dramatically. Doctors could find no connecting links, and concluded that it must be a symptom of having so many premature babies survive after birth. Ashton, a doctor, came up with the theory that the high oxygen was causing normally needed vessels to die off. Once back to normal air the infant’s bodies created a system of delicate and hastily grown new vessels to try and compensate for the loss. These abnormal vessels can bleed behind the lens, causing fibrous masses which lead to blindness. Once oxygen levels were lowered the cases dropped and by 1955 there were only 3 cases seen.

History is filled with quacks that only cared about making money. It is filled with doctors who justified faking research because in their minds the end justified the means. They fooled the public, and fooled themselves. But the damage they did seems trivial in comparison to the damage done by well meaning and misguided doctors. The worst of the medical blunders were caused by people who for the most part meant well. Today’s hospitals are a chaotic mess of patients waiting for hours and hours and rushing doctors. Not enough people have healthcare, lawsuits are rampant, and mistakes are many. A solution to this problem is difficult to find. Now that we have cures for many diseases that were fatal in the not-so-distant past we are much better off then we are. But the struggle continues.

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