The Hippocratic Oath states, "First do no harm",
but sometimes, even doctors can make mistakes. And those mistakes can have deadly consequences.
This is Dumb Ways to die- medical mishaps edition. In the early days of medicine, the treatment
sometimes turned out to be more deadly than the disease. During a plague outbreak in London in
the 1660s, a common prescription for the disease was tobbacco. People, even kids, were told by
their doctors to smoke cigarettes as a way of disinfecting the air and stopping the plague from
spreading. In the 1700s, tobacco enemas were also a common treatment for drowning victims. If you're
wondering how this procedure worked...have you ever heard someone use the expression "blowing
smoke up your ass"? Well, tobacco enemas are where that expression originated from. We'll
let you paint the mental picture from there. Needless to say, it put more people in
early graves than it ended up saving. When you hear "chainsaws", you probably think
of either lumberjacks or horror movie villains, right? Well, believe it or not, an early
version of the chainsaw was a surgical tool used to aid in childbirth. In a procedure known
as a symphysiotomy, doctors would use a handheld mechanical chainsaw to cut through the pelvic
ligaments, and sometimes even the bone itself, in order to remove babies from their mothers’
wombs more easily. Despite previously being seen as less risky than a c-section,
symphysiotomy still led to a laundry list of potentially fatal infections and health problems.
It’s why you won’t be seeing Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the ICU these days.
In the 1900s, doctors discovered that small amounts of radium could be useful in treating
certain types of cancer. Not realizing that overexposure could have the opposite effect,
doctors then started prescribing it for all sorts of things, including for simple injuries.
It quickly caught on as a horrifically misguided health trend: It was put into chocolate,
quack health drinks, toothpicks, cosmetics, suppositories, health spa products, and
even wax urethral rods meant to increase male sexual potency. We hopefully don’t need
to tell you that, if not applied carefully by modern medical professionals, radium is far
more likely to cause cancer than treat it. So, in 1927, when American golfer Eben Byers
injured his arm, his doctor prescribed him a course of Radithor- a radium-enriched health
drink that was a popular cure-all at the time. Byers drank Radithor every day for three years
and didn't notice any ill effects...until his jaw started rotting off. When he died, The Wall
Street Journal published a headline equal parts hilarious and horrifying: “The Radium Water Worked
Fine until His Jaw Came Off.” After Byers' death from jaw cancer, the FTC started cracking down
on radium products. The creator of Radithor, William J Bailey, when asked to comment, said
"I've drunk more radium water than any man alive, and I never suffered any ill effects."
Bailey later died of bladder cancer. In the mid-20th century, concerns about
overcrowding in mental hospitals led to the development of the lobotomy, a procedure
pioneered by American neurologist Walter Jackson Freeman II and surgeon James Watts. While the
procedure has quite a barbaric reputation, at the time, lobotomies were seen as
an amazing advancement in neurosurgery because they were cheap, painless, and didn't
require drilling or cutting into the skull. Because of the early success of the procedure,
Freeman and Watts gained rockstar status in the field of medicine, and journalists would often
follow them around America and take pictures of the surgery in the process. Freeman loved
the attention and would often show off for the cameras while performing lobotomies. If you
think that showing off while you're carefully sticking a delicate surgical tool through a
person's eye socket sounds like a bad idea, you'd be right. During one surgery he performed
in Iowa in 1951, Freeman paused mid-surgery for a photo-op, not realizing that when he turned
to face the camera, he'd moved his hand just enough to fatally damage his patient's brain.
If you thought quack treatments were a thing of the past, think again. In 2012, Oneal Ron Morris
of Florida, USA, was charged with manslaughter and practicing medicine without a license when a
number of women fell ill and died after he gave them back-alley cosmetic surgery. Turns out that
the fillers he'd injected into their lips, cheeks, and even butts were a toxic mix of cement,
caulk, mineral oil, and rubber tire sealant. A similar case happened in 2020, when a man in
Dusseldorf, Germany, died of blood poisoning after getting penis enlargement surgery. The
'surgeon', a 46-year-old man named Torben K, was a restaurant worker who ran a makeshift clinic
out of his apartment. He has since been sentenced to five years in prison. Which we here at The
Infographics Show feel he’s more than earned. Back in the 1300s, a king by the name of
Charles the Second of Navarre was being treated for a number of serious illnesses.
Treatment at the time was far from advanced; the doctors basically just wrapped him up like
a mummy and soaked his bandages in brandy. This treatment was going fine until one of his
nurses went to replace the linen wrap around Charles' body. She sewed up the bandages and tied
a knot in the string. But instead of cutting the end with scissors, she had the bright idea to burn
the end of the thread off with a candle. Because of the brandy in the linen wraps, Charles went
up in flames immediately, and he burned to death while the nurse ran, horrified, from the scene.
Since Charles the Second was not a popular king - so much so that his nickname was literally
“Charles the Bad” - many saw his nightmarish, fiery demise as a kind of karmic punishment for
all his terrible deeds in life. Respect for the dead wasn’t as big in the 1300s, evidently.
On the subject of fire-based mishaps, in 2016, a woman in Tokyo had to be treated for
severe burns on her lower body after her fart caught fire while she was in hospital.
The woman was undergoing cervical surgery, which involved the use of a laser, which
sparked a fire when she passed gas. Thankfully, the woman survived, though we suspect she
probably came close to dying of embarrassment. Still in the category of wild near-misses, let's
meet Dr. Jack Barnes of Queensland, Australia. He was a general practitioner who ran a practice in
the far north of the state. Northern Queensland is home to some of the world's deadliest jellyfish-
the box jellyfish, whose venom can be lethal to humans, not to mention horrifically painful
to experience even if you manage to survive. In addition to being a doctor, Barnes was very
interested in marine biology and wanted to see if cataloging all of the different types of box
jellyfish venom could help him more effectively treat their stings. A noble pursuit, to be
sure, and in 1958, he even got a grant from the British Medical Association to perform a box
jellyfish study. But how did Dr. Barnes choose to do this study? By catching jellyfish in the
wild and getting them to sting him. Even crazier, to increase his sample size, he also tested
box jellyfish venom on a local lifeguard who volunteered to help out, and on his son, who was
only 9 at the time. Maybe call in CPS on that one. Miraculously, nobody died in the process,
and through his research, Barnes was able to catalog a new species of jellyfish- carukia
barnesi- as well as develop treatments for box jellyfish stings that are still used by lifeguards
and paramedics to this day. So maybe subjecting his nine-year-old son to potentially lethal
jellyfish stings was all worth it in the end. But of course, it isn’t always the doctors
themselves that can cause dumb death via medical mishap. Sometimes, the patients or even
bystanders can be party to their own demise. Such as in the case of this ill-considered home
remedy that ended up having lethal consequences. Tina Christopherson, a woman who had grown to
believe she was suffering from stomach cancer, drank four gallons - or fifteen liters - of water
a day in hopes of improving her condition. She instead, predictably, died of water intoxication.
26-year-old Mark Gleeson from the UK suffered from chronic snoring, and in an effort to put
a stop to it, he tried plugging his nose with tampons - causing him to suffocate in his sleep.
When you go to the hospital, it's extremely important that you follow any instructions
that the doctors give you. That's a lesson that Leandro Mathias de Novaes of Sao Paolo,
Brazil, had to learn the hard way in 2023. When he went to the hospital to accompany his
mother while she got an MRI, hospital staff gave him very clear instructions to remove all metal
objects before going into the MRI room. De Novaes, who was a vocal advocate for gun ownership,
decided not to comply and held onto the loaded handgun he had brought with him in his
waistband. When the MRI machine was switched on, its powerful magnet pulled the gun out of
de Novaes' pants and caused it to discharge, shooting him in the abdomen. He died
of his injuries a few weeks later. A common phrase hardcore gun rights activists
use is, “You can take it from my cold, dead hands.” The powerful magnetic pull of
an MRI is evidently extremely good at that. Another tragic MRI-related mishap happened in
2001, when a 6-year-old boy from New York, USA, was crushed by a metal oxygen tank that was
left too close to the machine while he was getting an MRI. The magnetic field produced by
an MRI machine is 200 times more powerful than a common fridge magnet, and about 30,000 times more
powerful than the earth's natural magnetic field, so any metal drawn into that field is
going to travel with some serious force. Alright, let's have one more bizarre MRI death to
take it up to a nice, even three. Rajesh Maru of Mumbai, India, was carrying an oxygen tank into
a room where, unbeknownst to him, the MRI machine was switched on. He died when he was sucked
into the machine. The weirdest part of this one was the fact that Maru didn't even work at the
hospital. He was there to visit his uncle, and while he was there, a junior staff member asked
him to move the cylinder into the room for him, assuring him that the machine had been turned off.
Of course, no list of crazy medical mishaps is complete without Robert Liston, king of
the amputation speedrun, who was famous for his brutally efficient surgical techniques.
Back in the 19th century, before the invention of anesthesia, it was essential for surgeons to get
in and get out as quickly as possible to minimize patient suffering. You had to be fast, and Liston
was the fastest surgeon out there. His record for leg amputation was 28 seconds, and he was so
sure of himself that before every procedure he performed, he would yell out "Time me, gentlemen!"
But as we all know, pride cometh before the fall, and eventually, Liston got a little too confident.
During a routine leg amputation, he brought the knife down so fast that his assistant didn't
have time to move his fingers out of the way, and he lost two of them along with the patient's
leg. Then, when Liston pulled the knife out, he accidentally sliced one of the spectators
on the backswing. The patient, the assistant, and the spectator all died from infection,
making Robert Liston the only surgeon to ever perform a procedure with a 300% mortality rate.
In 1952, Margaret Wise Brown, a children's picture book author best remembered for the classic
Goodnight Moon, had to get surgery for a ruptured appendix. When she was about to be discharged
from hospital, she kicked her leg up in the air to demonstrate how healthy she was feeling. Later
that year, she died of an embolism while on a book tour in France. What did that have to do with
her surgery? Well, turns out there was a blood clot in her leg that had gone untreated, and when
she did that high kick to show off for the nurse, the clot dislodged and moved upwards to her heart.
In 1985, Miami Herald photographer Bob East died after a toxic chemical called glutaraldehyde was
accidentally injected into his spine by doctors. He went into the hospital to receive cancer
treatment and was about to go into surgery when his anesthesiologist, Anthony Gyamfi, realized
he'd injected the wrong vial into East's spine. Gyamfi had accidentally picked up the chemical
that was supposed to be used by an eye doctor to preserve cancerous eye tissue. In a scene that
would've been funny if nobody had died, Gyamfi didn't realize the mix-up until the eye doctor
came into the operating room asking if anyone knew where he'd put his vial of glutaraldehyde.
Truth truly is stranger than fiction. Have you ever been too embarrassed to ask for
help after making a mistake? That's exactly what happened with some doctors in Sydney, Australia,
who were operating on a 20-year-old car accident victim in 2021. During surgery, the man's
breathing tube became dislodged, and it took a very long time for the doctors to notice.
When they eventually did, they tried to fix it, but it didn't work. After that, they could've
called a specialist to replace the tube in only a couple of minutes, they just ignored the issue
altogether. The cherry on top of this situation- when the man's family asked to see his death
records, the hospital withheld and then destroyed them to cover up the manslaughter.
In 2007, brain surgeons at Rhode Island Hospital received a reprimand after it was found
that they had been operating on the wrong side of the patient's brain, not just once, but three
times. One surgeon was fined 50,000 dollars for drilling into the left side of the patients' skull
when scans clearly showed that the bleeding was on the right. The fine and the reprimand didn't seem
to do anything, though. because in August of the same year, another patient died after another
surgical team at the same hospital operated on the wrong side of his brain. Apparently,
you don't need to know how to tell left from right to get a medical degree in Rhode Island.
Over in Pakistan, an 80-year-old woman died in hospital in 2021 when a man who used to work for
the hospital as a security guard impersonated a doctor and performed surgery on her back. The
man, Muhammad Waheed Butt, had been fired from the Lahore hospital two years before the incident
for trying to extort money from patients. Lahore police said that this wasn't the first time he'd
posed as a doctor, either. Before being fired, he would make fraudulent house calls to patients,
who paid him believing he was a real doctor. When using Pakistani public hospitals, patients
are required to pay some portion of the cost of treatment upfront. It was this money that Butt
was hoping to defraud from his multiple victims. When asked how Butt had been able to get in, a
hospital official simply said, "We can't keep up with what every doctor and what everyone is
doing at all times. It's a large hospital." Sometimes, medical mishaps aren't a result
of the doctors themselves, the patients, or even charlatans posing as doctors
- in the high-stakes world of surgery, even poor record-keeping can kill.
This is what happened to Jessica Santillan of North Carolina, USA. She had
a congenital heart defect and needed both her heart and lungs replaced. After years on a
waiting list, she was taken into surgery at Duke Hospital in 2003. However, her body didn’t
accept the transplants, and she tragically passed away in hospital. The reason for her
death? The organs were the wrong blood type, and nobody caught the error- the doctors just
assumed that if they were available, they must be compatible. It was a stupid and frankly
amateurish mistake that cost a woman her life. In Brazil, an 88-year-old woman named Ilda
Vitor Maciel died in 2012 after having soup injected into her bloodstream. How does
something like that even happen? Well, Maciel had been in hospital after suffering a
stroke that had left her unable to eat on her own. She had a feeding tube in her stomach, and
an IV drip in her arm, and the nursing technician taking care of her got the two tubes mixed up. The
director of the hospital acknowledged the mistake but denied that the soup injection was directly
responsible for the woman's death. Her family believed otherwise, and filed for a lawsuit.
Medical blunders don't just happen to humans- vets can suffer freak accidents just as
easily. In 2012, a vet from the UK named Erica Marshall was performing surgery on a horse
in a hyperbaric chamber, which is a chamber filled with high-oxygen air to help speed up healing.
The problem with these chambers is that high oxygen air is also extremely flammable, so when
Marshall's equine patient got scared and kicked through the wall of the chamber. The horse's shoe
caused a spark that, in turn, caused an explosion, which killed both Marshall and the horse.
It’s all enough to make you want to stay away from hospitals, isn’t it? Because sometimes,
you don’t even need to be in or even close to surgery to die in one. Such is the bizarre and
tragic case of Hitoshi Nikaidoh, an aspiring missionary doctor at Christus St. Joseph Hospital
in Houston, Texas, in 2003, became trapped in a faulty elevator while a colleague was inside.
The doors got caught around Hitoshi’s head, and the elevator rose, decapitating the aspiring
doctor and trapping an unfortunate woman who worked at the hospital in the elevator with his
corpse. She was in there for over fifteen minutes before she was rescued and taken into care.
Want to hear more dumb ways to die? Go check out Dumb Ways to Die – Florida
Edition. Or watch this video instead!
