IN August 1975, three patients suffered cardiopulmonary arrests within 15 minutes of each other at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan. An astute anesthesiologist noticed that all three patients looked as if they had been administered a muscle-paralyzing agent— which, as it turned out after much investigation, they had.
Rarely can the commencement of a tradition be placed so precisely in time—the tradition in question being that of nurses murdering their patients wholesale. Of course, it is quite possible that an underground tradition of this nature existed undetected even before the events at Ann Arbor, but from that time forth there have been epidemics, both large and small, of unexpected death at regular intervals wherever murderous nurses have taken employment. On March 26 of this year, for example, the nurse Kristen Gilbert, somewhat unimaginatively dubbed the “Angel of Death,” was sentenced to life imprisonment for having fatally injected three of her patients with a stimulant to mimic heart attacks. And in November 1999, a nurse named Orville Lynn Majors was sentenced to 360 years’ imprisonment for having killed six of his patients by injection of potassium chloride.
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