Bad Medicine

By R.Z. Sheppard

James B. Stewart's Blind Eye: How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away with Murder (Simon & Schuster; 334 pages; $25) is a persuasive case against Dr. Michael Swango, a handsome, over-confident physician suspected of poisoning between 35 and 60 patients and co-workers from Illinois to Zimbabwe.

Witnesses have put Swango at the bedside of some victims moments before they died. Colleagues report his fascination with violence and the serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. Stocks of poisons and hypodermic needles were found in Swango's living quarters. Yet the best the law could do was convict him of falsifying a job application and sentence him to 42 months in a federal prison. He is scheduled for release in July 2000.

Stewart's copious findings indicate that hospitals fired Swango rather than risk liability suits and damaging publicity. But such butt covering does not support the subtitle's alarmist indictment of "the medical establishment." Yet the need to buck up Stewart's new book with a sensational subtitle is understandable. In his 1991 best seller, Den of Thieves, the author had the advantage of writing about financiers Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, two super-rich felons rarely out of the limelight. Swango resists efforts to come alive on the page. He is a shadowy figure, an evasive loner with bizarre obsessions and an abundance of low animal cunning.

And he has not been convicted of a single murder. This pesky legality results in some narrative discordance. For 300 pages, Blind Eye has Swango killing people right and left. Yet Stewart's conclusion contains a flurry of qualifying statements like "Swango is the first alleged serial killer in this century to have emerged in the guise of a physician." However inconvenient, writers have to obey libel laws; too many lawyers are watching. But where were the language police when Stewart chose the word guise? It means semblance, and if we know anything for sure, it is that Swango did not resemble a doctor; he was one.

--By R.Z. Sheppard