Diagnosis & Disease Information

Torture techniques conjured up in medieval times, especially the gruesome methods employed during the Crusades, took a giant leap forward thanks to Dr. Shiro Ishii’s diabolical imagination. The human suffering he was responsible for remains unimaginable and incomprehensible. He is infamous for being the director of a biological warfare research and testing program of the Imperial Japanese Army that existed from 1937 to 1945 during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II.

They just wanted to look a little trimmer in the tummy and lose a little weight, but 2 patients lost their lives instead during their liposuction procedures. Dr. Peter Normann was an internist, an emergency room doctor, and not a plastic surgeon, yet he performed liposuction surgeries on unsuspecting patients at his clinic in Anthem, Arizona. Dr. Normann never entered a residency in plastic surgery or anesthesiology; he did have about 6 days of training in liposuction and breast augmentation, but he certainly wasn’t qualified to perform such operations. What’s more, he had no training in fat augmentation, yet he performed a buttocks enhancement plastic surgery on at least 1 patient, who died as a result of gross medical incompetence that led to a critical surgical error. It gets worse.

From 1942 through 1944, Dr. Marcel Petiot, a highly respected physician in his community, saw an opportunity to build his personal wealth during the insanity of World War II in Paris. It was a black period in Parisian history, when Jewish families hoped to escape slaughter. It was a surreal time in Paris as World War II was raging; and disappearances were commonplace in the Nazi-occupied city. There was nowhere to turn. Fearing for their lives, Jews couldn’t report missing persons to the Nazis.

He started off his medical and criminal career as a swindler and subsequently added “serial killer” to his resume. His birth name was Herman Webster Mudgett but he was better known by his alias, Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, or H.H. Holmes. At an early age, Mudgett expressed an interest in medicine and was said to have practiced surgery (some called it torture) on animals. He also expressed an utter fascination and obsession with death. Mudgett received his medical degree in 1884 from the University of Michigan Medical School. As a medical student, he utilized his skills as a swindler, a fraud, and a con artist. He devised an elaborate scam where he would collect money on false life insurance claims. Mudgett would steal cadavers from the university laboratory and dismember the bodies.