Title: |
The Icepick Surgeon |
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Author: |
Sam Kean |
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Category: |
Non-fiction |
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Rating: |
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Date Reviewed: |
July 3, 2026 |
The Icepick Surgeon has twelve chapters. Each describes an individual or two who committed grievous offenses (at least when seen from today's moral viewpoint). Despite the book's title, not every crime was performed in the pursuit of science, but all offenses were committed by scientists or science-related persons, such as doctors. Piracy: The Buccaneer Biologist. William Dampier was an Englishman with a passion for the natural world. He was also a sailor, and in the English navy he sailed around the world, which gave him ample opportunity to collect exotic species. But the perpetually impoverished Dampier also needed money, and anyone with a ship could engage in piracy in the hopes of winning a fortune. Dampier became a pirate/naturalist. Slavery: The Corruption of the Flycatcher. Henry Smeathman personally thought slavery was a grave wrong. Smeathman arrived in Africa in the 18th century to collect specimens - he dreamed that scientific achievements would enable him to be admitted into the Royal Society. Smeathman did great work - his extensive termite research resulted in his nickname of Monsieur Termite. Unfortunately for Smeathman, all economic transactions in Africa at that time involved the buying and selling of slaves, and Smeathman needed to purchase supplies for his scientific expeditions. Smeathman also found himself fraternizing with slavers simply because there were no other Europeans around; and thus Smeathman unwillingly slid down the slippery slope. Grave-Robbing: Jekyll & Hyde, Hunter & Knox. In 19th century England, doctors were desperate for corpses so that they could perform dissections and learn how the human body worked. This led to the unsavory practice of grave-robbing. John Hunter was a well-respected anatomist and surgeon who made many discoveries about how humans function. However, Hunter was not too particular about where the bodies came from when he bought them from suppliers. Hunter was later used as a model for the character in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Even worse than grave robbing, a pair of thugs named Burke and Hare realized that they wouldn't even have to venture into the graveyard if they quietly killed people who were expected to die soon anyway and were unlikely to be missed. Murders ensued. Murder: The Professor and the Janitor. Harvard professor and medical doctor John White Webster owed money to George Packman, a stickler for loan repayment. An argument ensued
and Webster ended up killing Parkham by braining him with a hunk of firewood. To hide the murder, Webster tried to dismember the corpse and burn it. But a janitor grew suspicious and discovered pieces of the body.
The crime was a sensation; it was the trial of the century. In the courtroom, other Harvard scientists pointed out how various parts of the dismembered corpse proved that it was Packham's body. This was one of
the first uses of forensics in a trial.
Animal Cruelty: The War of the Currents As a child, did your reader include a tale about the genius Thomas Edison and his invention of the light bulb? This chapter reveals a much
darker side of Edison. Westinghouse was building power networks to light up cities using AC current, while Edison was stuck with a network of inefficient DC power stations. In an attempt to swing public opinion against AC current,
Edison had cronies electrocute animals in an attempt to demonstrate that AC current was more dangerous than DC current. The first prisoner executed in the electric chair was killed with AC current in a botched execution that went horribly wrong. Sabotage: The Bone Wars. Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh were two 19th century American paleontologists who started out as friends but ended up as bitter enemies as each attempted
to out-perform the other when it came to discovering and describing new species of dinosaurs. Their rivalry resulted in a frenzy of fossil hunting and explosion in human understanding of the prehistoric world. But the intense rivalry also
results in bitter feuds, and even schemes to sabotage the findings of the other team. Oath-Breaking: Ethically Impossible. This chapter describes the infamous Tuskegee syphilis research trial. But is also unearths an even more unnerving set of experiments by Dr. John Cutler, who
went to Guatemala to study sexually transmitted diseases. Unfortunately, to gather enough data, Cutler ended up trying to deliberately infect Guatemalans with gonorrhea and syphilis. Soldiers and sailors were always susceptible to STDs; Cutler
wanted to study how they were spread and what their symptoms were - this is despite the fact that penicillin was widely available at the time and even if this research had yielded results, it was unnecessary. Ambition: Surgery of the Soul. This is perhaps the most horrifying chapter in the book. Dr Freeman wanted to help the mentally ill, he was horrified that doctors had no effective treatments for
people in agonizing, debilitating illnesses. Unfortunately, Freeman got the idea that a lobotomy - cutting some of the connections from the brain to the frontal lobes - would quiet some of the voices and demons in the patients' heads.
Freeman performed the lobotomies by jamming a standard icepick through the tear ducts of the mentally ill. The icepick could easily pierce the thin bone at the back of the ice socket, allowing Freeman to drive the icepick into the
brain and wiggle it around, randomly severing brain tissue. He performed thousands of these operations, and sometimes they actually seemed to help. Sometimes. Espionage: The Variety Act. This is the story of Harry Gold, a chemist who spied for the Soviets, passing along information about atomic weapons. His motivation was political, not scientific. Torture: The White Whale. Henry Murray was a Harvard professor who attempted to determine the best way to get prisoners to talk. Murray hit upon the idea of abusive interrogation - young students would be
lured into a setting that they were told was a debate forum. But the other "debater" was actually there to deliver verbal abuse, to see how the teenage students would react. One of the students who was subjected to repeated sessions of
abuse was a brilliant youngster named Ted Kaczynski, who later gained notoriety as the Unabomber.
Malpractice: Sex, Power and Money. In a circumcision that went dreadfully wrong, the penis of an 8 month old child named Bruce Reimer was literally burned off. Dr John Money was a famous psychologist who
claimed that gender is entirely the result of environmental cues. Money convinced Reimer's parents to raise him as a girl, and he would be a well-adjusted child and never know the difference. Things turned out much worse than anticipated.
Fraud: Superwoman Annie Dookham worked in a Boston crime lab. Her job was to examine samples of powders collected from crime scenes and confirm what their contents were - was it cocaine, heroin or harmless baby powder?
Dookhan wanted to be acknowledged as the best, hardest worker on the staff. She tested samples at a rate three or four times faster than her fellow lab workers. Alas, Dookhan's speed was not the sign of incredible competence but turned out
to be faked results. Dookhan simply invented test results for over 36,000 samples of crime scene evidence. Any trial that involved her results had to be invalidated - 21,587 convictions were overturned. The book will leave the reader shaking their head at human behavior. A lot of this is astonishing and depressing. Did I really want to know how evil Thomas Edison was? It is definitely an interesting read. Kean's next
book, Dinner with King Tut, promises to have much more uplifting material; I have already checked it out of the library.
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