“
Primum non nocere” is
Latin and means “
First, do no harm” and it comes from the Hippocratic Corpus. It’s one of the principles that med students are taught in
school, reminding them that they must always first consider whatever harm any medication can do. Now follows the story of a very dangerous man who went to
medical school, became a doctor and went on to cause tremendous harm on purpose.
Michael Swango was born in Tacoma, Washington and raised in Illinois where he went on to graduate from Quincy Notre Dame High School in 1972. He served in the Marine Corps and then went on to attend SIU (Southern Illinois University medical school where his odd behavior was quickly noticed. He was known as a quite lazy student who was pre-occupied with the dead. He did, however, manage to graduate and he got a surgical internship at Ohio State University in 1983. During Swango’s internship, patients started dying at an alarmingly high level and some nurses noticed him injecting patients with an unknown drug. But their concerns went unhead and he was cleared in whatever investigation was done. He was not asked back, though.
He went on to Quincy, Illinois, and began working as an emergency medical technician, where his servings of coffee and dougnuts to his colleagues soon started a new investigation, since they all became so violently ill. Police found arsenic in his possession and he was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment. In 1989 he found another job as a laboratory technician but in this job, colleagues also began getting ill, complaining of stomach pains. When he resigned this job, he went on to seek employment as a doctor, forging his medical papers and sporting the new name Daniel M. Kirk. He was accepted at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota – and then he grew cocky. He attempted to join the AMA (American Medical Association) and they investigated a lot further than Swango had expected. They discovered his earlier conviction of arsenic poisoning and so he lost his job at the medical center.
Unfortunately the AMA lost track of Swango and he went on to work as a psychiatry resident at the Northport Veterans Administration Medical center. Patients once more started dying at alarming rates. The dean in Sioux Falls tracked Swango down and informed his current place of employment who fired him and the director sent a warning about Michael Swango to over 125 medical schools and more than 1000 teaching hospitals across the country.
This forced Swango out of the country and he left for Zimbabwe where he found employment at Mnene Hospital.
He once again began murdering patients but it would be over a year until authorities tracked him down and he was arrested. He managed to escape before the trial and hid out in Africa and places in Europe until he decided to apply for a job in Dhahrain. On his lay-over flight he had to stop at O’Hare Airport in Chicago where the authorities waited to arrest him.
Swango stood trial three years later on charges of murder and fraud. He was convicted of 3 murders but suspected of up to 60 murders and sentenced to life without parole.
His methods were rather consistent. With patients he would overdose them with the drug they were prescribed and with non-patients (colleagues) he would slip arsenic or another poison into their food or drink. He reminds me of another evil doctor: British
Harold Shipman who was suspected of having drugged and murdered more than 200 of his patients.
If you’re interested in reading/studying about people in the medical profession who do harm, I recommend
Crime Library’s chapter on this very subject.
