The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science in Science and Inquiry

Jan 21, 2024 CatReader rated it it was amazing

Shelves: cnet, best-of-2024

I'm a fan of Sam Kean's science writing (The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code and The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements were both excellent and both earned rare 5-star ratings from me), but I believe the Icepick Surgeon is Kean's best book yet.

This book presents a nuanced recounting of a dozen fascinating and discomfort-provoking true stor I'm a fan of Sam Kean's science writing (The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code and The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements were both excellent and both earned rare 5-star ratings from me), but I believe the Icepick Surgeon is Kean's best book yet.

This book presents a nuanced recounting of a dozen fascinating and discomfort-provoking true stories of scientists (some well-known today, others not so much) whose determination led to or resulted in serious ethical, legal, or criminal breaches:

- William Dampier (1651-1715) - English naturalist and pirate, who wanted to focus on science and exploration but kept getting enmeshed in privateering
- Henry Smeathman (1742-1786) - English naturalist who went from denouncing slavery to becoming entangled in the slave-trading industry for the sake of his scientific ambitions
- two 19th century English bodysnatchers-turned-murderers, William Burke (1792-1829) and William Hare (1792-?), and the anatomist who bought the bodies of their murder victims, Robert Knox (1791-1862)
- John White Webster (1793-1850) - Harvard lecturer who was convicted and hanged for the murder and dismemberment of Boston businessman George Parkman
- Thomas Edison (1847-1931) - while there is plenty of fodder for a book maligning Edison, the story in this book focuses on how he sponsored cruel and inhumane electrocution experiments on animals trying to prove the superiority of direct current electricity and vilify Westinghouse's alternating current, leading to electrocution of prisoners becoming used as an execution method even to this day (see AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War by Tom McNichol for more on this)
- Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897) and Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899), two American paleontologists who engaged in an intense fossil-finding competition with sometimes underhanded tactics called the Bone Wars (I just read Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind which features a similar pissing contest between modern-day archeologists)
- unethical medical studies of the 20th century, including those conducted by Nazi doctors during WWII and the Tuskegee syphilis study (1932-1972), including the ethically fraught role played by a Black nurse, Eunice Rivers (1899-1986)
- Walter Freeman (1895-1972) - an American physician who extolled the virtues and attempted to silence the harms done by lobotomies
- Harry Gold (1910-1972) - a Jewish-American chemist who spied for the Soviet Union during WWII
- Henry Murray (1893-1988) - a Harvard psychologist who conducted abusive psychological experiments on young adults, including a 17-year-old Ted Kaczynski
- John Money (1921-2006) - a sexologist and generally awful person who was convinced that gender is entirely an environmental construction and malleable within the first two years of life, who advocated for surgical reassignment of intersex infants (and who engineered and oversaw the cruel experiments done on David Reimer, who was raised as female and subject to gender non-affirming surgeries after a botched circumcision)
- Annie Dookhan (1971-?), a former chemist in the Massachusetts Department of Public Health Drug Abuse lab who falsified thousands of confirmatory drug tests on samples seized during police investigations, leading to many wrongful convictions and lasting negative repercussions on people's lives

Kean is careful to not fall into the trap of judging people in the past by today's morals, which I greatly appreciated. While the stories he highlights contain varying levels of wrongdoings, some characters definitely come across as more sympathetic (Dampier) than others (Money). ...more

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Nov 13, 2022 Rusty rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, non-fiction, history, prose, science

Sometimes I feel bad that knowledge, hard won, often the work of generations of people building on the work of those coming before them, paid for that knowledge with their lives, or were so obsessed with something that it practically ruined their livelihood, is now reduced to factoids or pieces of trivia that I half-remember when trying to show off at a party.

Like how Madam Curie suffered an excruciating death after dedicating her life to the pursuit of uncovering the mystery of radiation so I ...more

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Mar 12, 2022 David Schwan rated it really liked it

Like all books by Sam Kean this one is worth the read. We are presented with quite the rogues gallery of people, including feuding university professors, and the production line output of the icepick surgeon who would perform surgery on what now seems an insane number of people in a day.

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Aug 06, 2021 Erica rated it liked it

Shelves: 2021, audio-book

Good on par for Kean, but some of the stories were so disturbing that I didn't enjoy listening to this one nearly as much. ...more

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Sep 29, 2023 Alyssa Tuininga rated it really liked it

Shelves: physical-books-i-have, science, nonfiction

4.5/5

Fascinating book documenting the dark side of science. This book looks at things like Nazi doctors, grave-robbing anatomists, the Tuskegee experiment, etc. I knew many of the stories in the book already but many of the questions that this book raised were super interesting and really made me think about these issues. I really enjoy Sam Kean鈥檚 writing (although I enjoyed The Violinst鈥檚 Thumb more). There was definitely some difficult subject matter in this book but it was well worth a read ( ...more

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