BLIND EYE: HOW THE MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT LET A DOCTOR GET AWAY WITH MURDER
By James B. Stewart

The genre of true crime may not be any stranger than fiction, but there's no denying it's a lot scarier. Exhibit A: The strange case of Michael Swango, M. D.

It is hard to locate exactly when Swango started to go bad, but we do know that he began being associated with mysterious deaths as early as medical school, where he was given the nickname "Double-O Swango" - a doctor with a license to kill.

During his internship at the prestigious Ohio State University Medical Centre, this pattern continued, concluding with the attempted murder of Rena Cooper, a 69-year-old widow hospitalized for a back operation. Shockingly, Swango was cleared of wrongdoing by a hospital board of investigation (despite the presence of three eyewitnesses), and, after having his internship cancelled, quietly allowed to continue his studies elsewhere.

Swango's passion was poison, his modus operandi usually involving some kind of lethal injection. Yet despite his suspicious record, and even a criminal record for poisoning a group of his co-workers, he was able to repeatedly find work at other hospitals both in the U. S. and abroad (Stewart follows his trail all the way to Zimbabwe). By the time he was finally jailed (for fraud), he was suspected by the FBI of having killed 60 people, a figure that would make him one of the most prolific serial killers in American history.

If that was all there was to the story, then Blind Eye would simply be another case study in criminal psychopathy. As the title indicates, however, Stewart's real target is the medical establishment that allowed Swango to pursue his criminal career for so long. And it is this part of the story that makes Blind Eye such a truly disturbing book.

What Stewart argues is that a buck-passing medical system shares a large part of the blame for Swango's crimes. Poweful people, in positions of trust, routinely ignored clear evidence of danger and exposed the most vulnerable members of our society to mortal risk.

In fact, even after Swango's apprehension, the Ohio State administration continued to stonewall both press and prosecutors. Nor was federal legislation in these matters any help. A national data bank set up in 1990 to monitor incompetent and criminal physicians has been a complete failure due to the medical profession's almost total refusal to report on itself.

"The loyalty among physicians," Stewart concludes, "makes police officers' famous 'blue wall of silence' seem porous by comparison."

It is a shameful record, and one that would normally demand some kind of institutional response. Normally, but in this case unlikely. Given the power of the establishment, it will be easier to turn a blind eye.

Notes:
Review first published December 24, 1999.

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