The Physician As A Killer

When Doctors Kill: Who, Why, and How
Joshua A. Perper
Springer (2010),
Paperback, 253 pages
Rated 4 stars of 5 possible

As I started to read When Doctors Kill, quite unlike several other reviewers, I had no preconceived notions of what I would find in this book and was completely unsure how the text would be arranged. I was glad to see the historical arrangement, as that helped me to better assimilate the content. The first part of the book, a discussion of ethics, read much like the college lecture I sat through on a similar topic many years ago. Fortunately that part ended just about the time I was beginning to experience some boredom.

Many of the real-life cases discussed were high-profile enough that I remember some details of those which happened during my lifetime. Also, many cases were older and either took place before my time, or while I was so young I have no memory of those. The older cases made for some interesting reading and comparison with the more modern ones.  The authors could have gone more in-depth on some of the cases covered here, but expanding the depth would have served little purpose, as I don't believe this book was meant to do more than make the reader aware of the reasons why doctors kill, and it serves that purpose well and in an interesting manner as is.

I would have normal expectations of proof reading having taken place during the production phase of this book, yet I was appalled to see that several errors of sentence structure, grammar and puncutation have slipped into what otherwise appears to be a finished book... some of them so obvious that most anyone will notice. Some errors are a little less obvious, such as the ones in the chapter on Elvis Presley, where there is an apostrophe after nearly every instance of his first name. Use of the apostrophe indicates the possessive form, which is not always the form of Elvis' name that should have been used.  Errors such as these would be expected in an uncorrected proof, yet nowhere in this book or on the covers does it have any indication of being an advance copy.

At the end of the book, I was delighted to see that several references are included, beginning with some "For Further Reading" lists, which are broken down by chapter, authors notes, and a fairly extensive index, which makes specific topics easy to locate. These references, along with the eminently readable, layman-style writing on a topic that is fairly scientific have earned this book four stars.

This book was provided to me free by the publisher in exchange for this review.  This review has been simultaneously published on Dragon Views, LibraryThing and Amazon.com