Available:*
Material Type | Library | Call Number | Suggested Age | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Chapmanville Public Library | 364.1523092 A | Adult | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Relates the story of a doctor who, despite psychotic episodes and four attempts to murder patients, was able to resume medical practice and later killed two strangers.
Reviews (3)
Kirkus Review
A mostly unsuccessful attempt to fathom the psyche of a doctor who claimed that voices often directed his bizarre behavior. Ablow, a columnist for the Washington Post and a practicing psychiatrist in Lynn, Mass., examines John Kappler's troubled life and tries to peer into his tortured mind. He opens this account with the day that Kappler, a truly unsympathetic character and a terribly dangerous man, drove his car off a parkway in Boston and aimed it carefully at two people on a pedestrian path. One of them, a psychiatrist friend of the author's, was killed. Ablow then turns to Kappler's childhood, looking for clues and speculating about the causes of his instability, anger, and destructiveness. He traces Kappler's spotty medical career (he was a freelance anesthesiologist, working out of some 50 hospitals in the Los Angeles area) and his frequent nervous breakdowns. Over the years Kappler received more than a dozen different diagnoses from psychiatrists and sporadically took numerous medications, including antipsychotics. Though he seems to have received little real help, it is not clear that he would accept any. Despite his problems and the threat his erratic behavior posed to patients, he continued practicing medicine until 1985, when he was accused of turning off a patient's life support system. Although the charges were later dismissed, Kappler, thoroughly disgraced, finally retired. The last portion of the book focuses on the murder trial in Boston, at which the central issue was whether Kappler was accountable for his actions or not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury found him guilty, but Ablow argues that he should more properly be seen as a victim--both of mental illness and of psychiatry's failure to help him. Ablow speculates and opines freely, but Kappler, who refused to be interviewed, remains a dark mystery.
Booklist Review
This is an unsettling story of how an unstable physician committed harmful acts against his patients and had them covered up by his colleagues and nurse-wife. Anesthesiologist John F. Kappler Jr. continued practicing despite giving near-fatal injections to several patients and shutting off a respirator, almost killing another. He had been hearing voices for several years and had been in and out of hospitals for psychiatric problems, yet no one blew the whistle. Finally, in 1990 he turned his car onto a jogging path and killed one runner--a young psychiatrist who was a friend of the author--and terribly injured a young mother. A detailed report of the ensuing trial that finally put Kappler in prison takes up one-third of the book, and Ablow, a psychiatrist, uses the whole story to plead for changes in psychiatric education and practice as well as for higher social consciousness among physicians and hospital administrators. ~--William Beatty
Library Journal Review
Dr. John Kappler was convicted of murder, armed assault, and assault and battery after he drove off a Massachusetts parkway and on to a jogging path, deliberately running down two pedestrians in 1990. The incident capped decades of hospitalization and treatment for depression, hearing voices, strange behavior, and fatal or near-fatal incidents where Kappler worked. Almost more chilling than the actual tragedy on the jogging path was the way Kappler's behavior was hidden or explained away by his family, co-workers, and even his psychiatrist. The author, himself a doctor, addresses the question of biology vs. environment in mental illness and also whether or not Kappler really was ill or just faking his symptoms to excuse his behavior. A well-written look at decades of unheeded warnings that culminated in murder.-Christine Moesch, Buffalo & Erie Cty. P.L., N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
