Dr Death. posted by Richard Seymour

Only Ken Dodd has sent more old ladies to sleep than Dr Harold Shipman, and he didn't even do it on purpose. The medical doctor is a repository of such trust, such reverence indeed, that it is hard to credit stories like this . Doctors and psychiatrists participated in the torture of Iraqi prisoners, it seems, both by divulging medical records and by collaborating with interrogators.

It shouldn't be a surprise. As Martin Amis points out in Yellow Dog, doctors are not to be trusted. Maps are the ultimate form of power-knowledge, and imagine what someone with a map of your body or brain could do. If you can't be bothered to imagine, let me tell you. They can inject poisons into a woman's cervix, experiment with new forms of castration, cut you and inject sulfanilamide into the wound, chop off breasts, prepare cyanide salts to kill you, vivisect you, chop up your liver, split open your skull while you are conscious and experiment on your brain, inject tropical diseases into your bloodstream, bleed you to death, have you shot, beaten, shrink your head...


The shrunken head of a prisoner discovered at Buchenwald.

All in the name of research . Of course, some of what I described above was perfectly common in 19th Century America. Much of modern gynaecology developed from experiments on Irish women and slaves.

I'm not saying you should start fearing your family doctor but, you know, think about what they can do if they want to. Harold Shipman had acquired the cognomen "Dr Death" for years before the alarm bells rang. If my Dr had a nick-name like that, I'd have asked some fucking questions.