Mad Doctor



""What can I do with this one, Aphrodite? She won't...stay...still! I want to make them beautiful, but they always turn out wrong! That one, too fat! This one, too tall! This one, too symmetrical! And now... What's this, Goddess? An intruder?! He's ugly! Ugly! Ugly! UGLYYYYYYYY!""

- Dr. Steinman, Bioshock

"Vena cava! Heart starter! The doctor is IN! SANE!"

- Angelspit, "Vena Cava"

Ah, medicine! The wonderful science of putting people back together... or pulling them apart.

Let's face it, there's just something inherently creepy about medical doctors. Their profession is one that centers around guts, organs, blood and bones, things that could make the most hardened badass vomit on the spot and they don't even flinch during their operations day after day after day. They can take a knife to a man's flesh, open him up like a zip-lock bag, do lord-knows-what to the insides of their patients and close them up again, ready for the next patient. And they're always so... jolly.

This guy? This guy is all of that wrongness collected and made real.

This is the guy that uses his knowledge of the workings of the body (or of the mind) to do evil, abuses the authority he has from his doctorate, and practices freakish and horrific experiments, proving that Science Is Bad.

Of course, for all his insanity, the doctor may in fact be a Bunny Ears Lawyer who actually knows what he's doing. Patients may be terrified by the way he acts and the bizarre treatments he puts them through, but when the doctor is done with them they're actually cured.

This has happened often enough in Real Life that there's a branch of medical ethics devoted to figuring out what you can do to your patients For Science!, and (at least in the USA) every hospital and university has a committee whose entire job is to oversee research with human subjects. It's generally agreed that you must tell people you're experimenting on them, why, what the risks are, what they get out of it, and give them the opportunity to say no. The Other Wiki has more information than you require.

A supertrope of Deadly Doctor (a combatant in medical garb). The counterpart of Mad Artist and Mad Scientist in the field of medicine. Could be an Evilutionary Biologist. Some may have a Morally-Ambiguous Doctorate.

Not to be confused with an angry Time Lord.

Compare Depraved Dentist.

Anime and Manga

 * Kamiya Minoru, aka "Doctor" from Yu Yu Hakusho.
 * Dr. Muraki in Yami no Matsuei. Weirdly, he's actually an excellent doctor, except when he decides not to be.. It's implied he runs a successful medical clinic most of the time he's not doing things like vampirizing people for fun and trying to resurrect his dead brother's head.
 * Herr Doktor from Hellsing, responsible for the monstrous state of the Last Battalion.
 * The Crazy Awesome Desty Nova from Gunnm.
 * Faust VIII of Shaman King, who basically introduces himself by vivisecting the Sidekick. Then, reveals himself to be high as hell on morphine and tears open his own leg with a scalpel to replace a broken bone with one from one of his many skeletons. Of course, Defeat Means Friendship-- a long time later.
 * In Soul Eater, Franken Stein has a serious vivisection fixation, cutting apart and stitching back together his clothes, his house, his partner…
 * And apparently himself. There was this one Shirtless Scene that showed that he had a stitch pattern that wrapped around his torso.
 * Franken Fran is an oblivious Genki Girl example.
 * Dr. Jackal, holy holy hell Dr. Jackal of GetBackers. Those scalpels… brrr.
 * Nao's father from Midori Days. His biggest experiment is taking apart Midori from Seiji's arm.
 * Fullmetal Alchemist has a bunch of mad doctors aiding the evil Government Conspiracy at various points, the most prominent of which in the manga & Brotherhood anime is “The Man in White” (or “Gold Tooth,”) or in the original anime is Shou Tucker, The Sewing Life Alchemist. They are almost certainly inspired by the WWII German and Japanese examples below.
 * Shingen Kishitani in Durarara. Contrary to the most other examples, he's not really evil -- just crazy.
 * In Bleach, Mayuri Kurotsuchi arguably fits into this role because, although his primary function is not medicine, his research does lead him to cures and other treatments. Plus he's seriously messed up.
 * Letter Bee presents a Subversion of this trope with the Dr Thunderland Jr. He uses an eye patch and is obsessed with dissection, but besides that he is shown to be very kindhearted person who cares for the others despite of his ruthless.
 * Also his job actually helps people.
 * One Piece has the "Surgeon of Death" Trafalgar Law, who is a highly skilled and competent doctor who is known for being an extremely dangerous and cruel pirate.
 * Kabuto from Naruto, with a healthy dose of Mad Scientist to go with it.

Comic Books
"Dr. Xip was quite a pip
 * The Crime Doctor in The DCU, who started as a Batman villain but then naturally became the nemesis of Dr. Mid-Nite, the resident metahuman physician.
 * And from the department of Mad Psychiatry, we get the Scarecrow.
 * After dropping the gun toting, Hush evolved into this, performing heart surgery on Catwoman and throwing scalpels at Batman instead of knives.
 * Dr. Demagol in the ' 'Knights of the Old Republic'' comics.
 * Global Frequency #9: Surgeons in a medical research facility became literally Mad Doctors after the leak of an experimental gas. The surgeons' pre-existing fascination with the inside of the human body escalated into fanatical worship, and so... "They went into the wards, where their volunteer patients were. And they used stem-cell technology and bioreactors to make things out of them. And they're all still alive."
 * The Mirrorverse doppelganger of normally caring and trusted medic Ratchet, in the Transformers Shattered Glass universe. When Rodimus wound up on his operating table with a missing hand, he found that it had not been repaired, but had instead been replaced by a rusty circular saw.
 * Sawbones from Jonah Hex is a well educated and cultured man who enjoys using his medical skills to torture and murder people.
 * When a rare virus outbreak threatens the lives of all the children in San Francisco, the hypochondriac Dr.Samuel Register/Zookeeper, infected with a mutant strain of the same virus, is willing to let the infected children die while he attempts to disect the only known survivor for a cure for his own condition.
 * Marvel Universe villain Moonstone used to be a psychiatrist, who also liked to drive her patients to suicide.
 * Nexus featured a couple of these, most notably Dr. Xip.

He experimented

On the demented

And let their organs drip!"


 * Arguably a subversion, because we don't know for certain whether he's guilty. He is accused of these crimes, and is executed for them, but he denies the charges, and we never learn the truth.
 * Dr. Jonas Harrow from Spider-Man. A Back-Alley Doctor who specializes in Mind Control and making super villains.
 * The Surgeon General from Give Me Liberty - quote: "Crime is not a disease. Disease is a crime."
 * Dr Amadeus Arkham, the founder, and later inmate, of Arkham Asylum. His descendant Jeremiah Arkham has gone the same way. Jeremiah's successor as head of the Asylum is Alyce Sinner, who is a member of the Intergang Church of Crime. Harley Quinn used to be an Arkham doctor as well. The place clearly has an effect on people.
 * Pain of Last Man Standing has a Ph.D in Psychopathy.
 * From the ROTF tie-in comics, we have Flatline, who's best summed up as Josef Mengele as a Transformer.

Film

 * This is what Cornelius Evazan's famous twelve death sentences came from in Star Wars.
 * To save anyone else having to Google it, he's the "I don't like you either" guy who threatens Luke in the bar on Tatooine.
 * The Evil That Men Do (1984). Charles Bronson is hired to murder Dr Clement Molloch, a doctor who advises South American dictatorships on how to torture people.
 * The horror movie Dr. Giggles. Pretty self-explanatory.
 * Dr. Vanaccutt, from House on Haunted Hill
 * Dr. Freudstein in House by the Cemetery.
 * Dr. Heiter in The Human Centipede: First Sequence.
 * Men Behind the Sun is full of them.
 * Pauline from the independent film Excision.
 * The Silence of the Lambs: Hannibal Lecter used to be a psychiatrist....

Literature

 * Dr. Moreau of the eponymous The Island of Dr. Moreau.
 * Maester Qyburn from A Song of Ice and Fire. He was stripped of his maester status for performing autopsies on people...while they were still alive vivisections. He ended up working with the most foul and depraved mercenary in company in Westeros and beyond. And given the world includes companies led by people such as Gregor Clegane that is truly impressive. Qyburn fitted right in.
 * As of 'A Feast for Crows', Qyburn has moved on to being the main...interrogator...for.
 * Dr. Herbert West from H.P. Lovecraft's original story 'Herbert West-Reanimator'. Mad doctor tries to reanimate dead tissue in order to defeat death, a noble ideal, although his fervor and methods (including bodysnatching and using people who have just died, often directly or indirectly due to him) in order to get the 'freshest specimens' tip him safely over the edge into crazy.
 * The Igors from Discworld are a whole race of mad doctors. Of course, most of the time, they use their "madness" to merely assist their masters, be they vampires or the Watch.
 * Doctor Quatt from Jasper Fforde's The Big Over Easy.
 * In "The Temple of the Ruby of Fire", Geronimo Stilton encounters Dr. Wacky Whiskers a couple of times, to his horror. While a more benign version of this trope, his personal philosophy is "When in doubt, I give an injection. Everything gets better with an injection."
 * Colonel Titus Hyde from the Matthew Hawkwood novel Resurrectionist. Literally mad, as the novel starts with with escaping from Bethlem Hospital (the original Bedlam) by killing a visiting clergyman, cutting off his face and wearing it as a mask.
 * More of a Mad Research Psychiatrist than anything, but  from The Chronicles of Professor Jack Baling would technically count as one of these.

Live-Action TV

 * A Freak of the Week from Smallville was immortal and tried to do operations on his wife to make her immortal, too.
 * Dr. Crell Moset in Deep Space Nine, also referenced in Voyager and clearly based on Mengele. The crew of Voyager created a holographic replica of him to help remove an alien parasite from B'Elanna, and she refused treatment when she learned who they replicated. I believe there was also a Bajoran crew member who objected to the hologram because his grandfather was killed by the real doctor's experiments.
 * Dr. Tristan Adams from the Star Trek episode "Dagger of the Mind". Went a little too happy with his machine for rehabilitating mental patients, IIRC.
 * Also, The Doctor from Voyager, when he altered his programming in an attempt to become smarter (adding personality traits from others created an Enemy Within from their collective dark side.)
 * Another episode has a propagandistic holoprogram portraying the crew as evil people aiding the race that conquered them hundreds of years before. The Doctor is shown injecting a prisoner with a substance that destroys his brain.
 * Dr Elias Giger, the Bajoran scientist from the Deep Space 9 episode "On the Cards" is certainly eccentric, believing that cells die because they "get bored" and devises a machine to "excite" them. Unusually, although he is probably nuts, he doesn't turn evil.
 * The immortal, organ-stealing doctor from the Supernatural episode "Time is on my Side".
 * Namtar, of the Farscape episode "DNA Mad Scientist" performed cruel mutation experiments on sapient subjects in order to figure out how well it'd work if he gave those traits to himself.
 * One doctor on Law and Order: Criminal Intent was
 * Firefly's Dr. Matthias, head of the Academy responsible for the experiments that drove River insane. He is killed by the Operative near the beginning of Serenity. It is odd that both the most repulsive villain and the most noble hero of the series were doctors.
 * The X-Files has its share of crazy doctors engaged in cloning and hybrid experiments on humans. Special off-Myth Arc mention to the 4x06 episode "Sanguinarium" that introduces the worst kind of mad doctors: Satanist mad doctors.
 * "Doctor Jekyll" from season 9 of CSI.
 * Before that, you had the mad white supremacist eugenicist who killed Lady Heather's daughter in "Pirates of the Third Reich."
 * And it may be a stretch, but "Justice is Served" had a mad... nutritionist, who had a bad case of porphyria and thought the best way to stave off its symptoms was to feast on the most blood-rich organs of healthy men.
 * A Partnership for a Drug-Free America ad from the 1980's had a doctor high on marijuana... This is a later remake.

Music
"The doctor is in... God help us!"
 * Australian industrial duo Angelspit has general Mad Doctor appeal, with medical motifs such as pills and syringes appearing all over their merch, albums, et cetera. Their first studio album Krankhaus used the trope not only visually but musically. The band created a secret page explaining the backstory of the album, which can be found here.
 * Midwives of Ruin and their first album Malpractice. Let's just say that medical motifs are popular in industrial music.
 * Kool Kief's Doctor Octagon qualifies as this.
 * "Dr. Sin Is In" by Lordi, from the album Deadache, is about an evil doctor that does awful things to the singer. Given the singer in this case is a demon, that's one scary doctor.


 * The Nox Arcana album Blackthorn Asylum has Dr.Neville Aldritch, the own of the titular Bedlam House. He gleefully mutilates the patients of the asylum to fulfill his medical curiosity.
 * "The Doctor's Wife" by Clockwork Quartet has shades of this- given that the song is about his Sanity Slippage as he tries to save his wife.
 * Ever since Carcass introduced medical terminology and an obsession with pathology to death metal, mad surgeons and morticians has been a staple of extreme metal's lyrical and aesthetic themes. Aborted use this as their central theme, explicitly or implicitly inhabiting most of their album art and music videos.

Tabletop Games

 * Dungeons and Dragons has one or two in settings involving Mad Science:
 * Dr. Victor Mordenheim and Dr. Daclaud Heinfroth in Ravenloft.
 * Spelljammer has the whole race of these, Xixchil. They do --for a price-- any surgery feat imaginable, like "improvements" adding strength, "natural" armor, wings, sex changing, and so on. Xixchil just can't grasp their clients' (and players') assumptions and use their very non-humanoid common sense, working as close to the request as they imagine. Body Horror and Hilarity Ensues in all and any cases more ambiguous than medical or minor plastic surgery.
 * House Astyanath, a faction in the d20 setting "Infernum", are a House notorious for their almost religious fascination with pain, and are implied to have quite a few of these in their ranks. More explicit are Dissectionists - Mad Doctors as entertainers! For the delight and amusement of other demons, these depraved surgeons publically "peel" living creatures, using blades and alchemical concoctions to neatly remove skin from flesh, peel flesh from bone, and extract organs, all of which are arranged onto steel frameworks as part of the "show". The circulatory system and other such things must be kept intact during the "performance", so the end result is a grotesque flower of flesh and viscera... which is still alive, aware and in incomprehensible agony.
 * The Orks' "Mad Doks" or "Painboyz" are nothing but these. These Orks have basic medical knowledge hard-wired into their DNA, along with a compulsion to "tinker." They've been known to decapitate an Ork, and graft its head onto another Ork's body just to see what happens. Or swap two Orks' limbs, just for fun. Or replace an Orks' brain with a live squig, for the hell of it. Or give an Ork bionic lungs, when he came in with a toothache. You have to be really desperate to visit a Mad Dok, so some don't bother waiting for you to show up...
 * The most infamous of these would be Mad Dok Grotsnik, whose work included hiding explosives in the heads of his patients and detonating them when he felt like it. The other Orks' revenge and Grotsnik's subsequent "resurrection" at the hands his Grot assistants have left him a patchwork of greenskin and cyborg bits, and even loonier. Grotsnik occasionally amputates his own limbs "just to keep his hand in" and is rumored to be collecting parts from his patients to build a super-Ork. He is only alive because he is the unofficial court physician of the Ork warlord and prophet Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, whose "vishuns from da Gods" started right after Grotsnik gave him his adamantium skull (sans explosives).
 * The setting's Dark Eldar have Haemonculi, who have great knowledge of physiology and medicine, but use it for decidedly sadistic purposes. They share the Mad Doks' desire to "experiment," but have more tools at their disposal, so unfortunately their "patients" can live through more. They are often responsible for the lumbering, misshapen Grotesques that sometimes accompany Dark Eldar raiders as literal meat shields due to their inability to feel pain, while one story describes a Haemonculus who had a victim reduced to a collection of skin and organs hanging from hooks on his lab's ceiling. The victim was still alive.
 * Fabius Bile. He wears a lab coat made from human skin, and has transformed the population of entire planets in shambling monstrosities in genocidal experiments. He's so crazy he's spent thousands of years in the Warp and come out of it mostly unchanged. He created a master race that are the Space Marine Super Soldiers but stronger and crazier, while his failed experiments tend to disintegrate from the violence of their mutations.
 * Doctor Oscar Schneiderbunk, a character frequently quoted in the sidebars of Leading Edge Games' rulebooks such as Phoenix Command and Living Steel. He was made available as an NPC in the Living Steel adventure supplement KVISR Rocks, though if you find it necessary to go to him for treatment you might be better off eating a bullet. Examples of his unique bedside manner include  "Yes, you have lost a lot of blood, but with all the pieces you're missing, you shouldn't need as much." "Nurse, hand me my mallet. The swelling will stop the bleeding." "Nurse, hand me my mallet. I must tenderize the area before making the first incision." "In my career as a doctor I've learned to live with death, and now, Private, so will you. Except the living part." "Hand me my grenade. Pre-Op is getting crowded" 
 * New World of Darkness and the fan-game Genius: The Transgression:
 * If you suffer a crash in the Midnight Roads, you may attract a gremlin. Driven by a mad desire to fix anything -- or anyone -- that's "broken", it'll set itself down beside you and take those long drills and scalpels it has in place of fingers and it'll start to work. It'll cut and bore and stitch and weld and otherwise do its best to piece you together with whatever it has to hand -- if you're lucky, it'll just chop up any of your fellow passengers. More likely, it'll use the bits of the car or bike you crashed to do the work. If you end up living through their removing your ribs and replacing them with a chassis of solid metal, and grafting parts from an old clock to your heart to keep it beating, then they'll pull out your guts and put in a diesel processor before replacing the flesh of your trunk with plastic and rubber. But if you live through all that... relax! When the gremlin vanishes back into the Shadow, it'll take the magic keeping you alive with it, and you'll die more or less instantly. They also like to do things like trying to build a car from the carcasses of dead cattle and babies from scrap metal, just to see if they can make them "work".
 * This is also where many Geniuses and demiurges end up. In the first case, the Progenitors have just recovered from a fairly brutal and messy purge of the unmada and Illuminated in their ranks, and there's still a considerable chance for any given Genius to go screaming off the deep end and end up insane rather than just crazy.. In the second, the only way for a demiurge to catalyse the creation of a new Promethean lineage is obsession, and most have a healthy dose of desperation and insanity to go with it, neatly explaining why they spent so much time and effort trying to reanimate the dead.

Video Games
""Did zat sting? Saw-ry!""
 * Dr. Steinman from Bioshock. He scrawls "Beauty is a moral imperative" and "Above all, do no harm" around the level with the blood of his patients. That should tell you all you need to know about him.
 * Team Fortress 2's Medic: The healing properties of the Medigun were an accidental side-effect of whatever his experiments were supposed to be for.

""I'll fill my Pockets with their Livers!""
 * Meet The Medic pretty much sums him up. Apparently, progress sounds like an exploding heart.
 * Doctor Mundo is made of this trope.
 * Dr. Saleon, aka 'Dr. Heart', from Mass Effect.
 * Faust from Guilty Gear was once a successful doctor who went mad when he couldn't save a patient and became a serial killer. Eventually he recovered (slightly) and became The Atoner.
 * Also Doctor Baldhead, from the original game -- he's heavily implied to be who Faust was before he became The Atoner.
 * City of Heroes's Doctor Vahzilok.
 * The Doctor, Big Bad of Cave Story, and his Mengele-style experiments using the game's Psycho Serum.
 * The Oddworld series' Vykkers have this as their Racial Hat.
 * Yuna from Breath of Fire 4 wants to turn people into gods.
 * Vampire: the Masquerade- Bloodlines has Alistair Grout, psychologist and Malkavian Primogen. Only, he's from the old, old school of psychiatry, and thinks Freud was a pussy. Oh, and he's a Malkavian, a member of the clan of vampires who all go insane after the Embrace if they weren't before. All this combines to a manor full of Malevolent Architecture, escaped violent mental patients that he used for his own experiments, and his darling wife under glass.
 * Doctor Challus Mercer of Dead Space. Religious whackjob. Conducts experiments on unwilling subjects to make a even deadlier Necromorph. Proactively tries to kill Isaac by shutting down life support and releasing his Hunter. Crosses the Moral Event Horizon fairly early on and just gets worse from there.
 * The Suffering's Dr. Killjoy has his patients' best interests at heart and genuinely wants to cure them, but his patients have a poor survival rate due to his rather... questionable methods.
 * And that "poor" patient survival rating of his? Means that, barring Torque, they're all dead.
 * Doctor Fred Edison from Maniac Mansion has no compunction about kidnapping the protagonist's girlfriend to test out his new zombification machine, but as it turns out
 * In the sequel, Day of the Tentacle, Laverne isn't quite a doctor yet, but as a med-student she's on her way there. And she's certainly quite...unhinged.
 * The Marquis de Singe from Tales of Monkey Island.
 * Although probably not comparable to some of the others on this page, Shiro Miyata of Siren is far from sane. Before the game has even started he
 * Dr. Cutter's superstar persona in Rumble Roses XX.
 * William Taylor is revealed to be a mad doctor who has created a murderous frankenstein monster from his dead fellow crew mates.
 * "Dr. Mad" is a minor villain and a boss in the first Phantasy Star game.
 * Dr. Schabbs in Wolfenstein 3D.
 * Eirin Yagokoro of Touhou is often seen as this. She made a "fish bait" that caused fish to mutate into monsters and the bamboo fertilizer that made bamboo grow super fast and super strong in ''The Inaba of the Moon And The Inaba of the Earth," and also a nightmare pill. Fanon has her subjecting Reisen and others to medical experiments.
 * Marian, a witch-doctor wannabe, from Rune Factory 3 will like you to be her patiant and will force you to take a shot of her random medicine. 80% of her love events involve her putting you into a medical experiment or making you drag someone to her clinic. Everyone in the town's scared of her.
 * Edward Richtofen from Nazi Zombies.

Visual Novels

 * In the Tsukihime Visual Novel, Kohaku (pictured above) has great medicinal knowledge which she occasionally uses for rather worrisome ends. In the pseudo-sequel, one possible way to end the day is trapped in the basement jail with Kohaku about to inject you with many syringes. This carries over into Fanon and the fighting game adaption Melty Blood.
 * from Higurashi no Naku Koro ni.

Web Comics

 * Dr. Ink from Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures has been described, at times, as an "egotistical, calculating, raving lunatic."
 * He's even worse in his cameo in The Foxfire Chronicles. Not to mention how his creator usually portrays him.
 * Would Ansem Retort's Zexion count? If memory serves he not only implants explosives in people's organs, but also fused a man's DNA with a cookie just to see what would happen.
 * Schlock Mercenary had Dr. Pau on Heaven Hive with his highly experimental Nanobots and a little mafia enforcing the monopoly. He caused any harm at all only because, but was quite willing to go on.
 * Lampshaded in this Freefall.

Web Original

 * In Perpetual Change, is revealed to be one of these.
 * Dr. Insano. Mad engineering is his main calling, but he's been known to perform non-consensual surgery from time to time.
 * Ruby Quest has Filbert, a doctor who conducted unethical experiments on his patients and ended up inflicting them with The Corruption. He is now convinced that he has to “cut the bad out of them,” whether they're willing or not.
 * Not sure what Doctor Steel is a doctor of, but he is attended by sexy nurses.
 * The MSPA Fan Adventure Tricorne has Freida, a well-meaning surgeon who forgot the old principle "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" during her time in prison after being framed. She'd try to "improve" people by grafting them stuff like additional arms, and when they'd inevitably freak out, she'd apply emergency anaesthesia and undo the operation, letting them think they had a nightmare. She eventually got around that problem by making her upgrades purely internal.

Western Animation

 * The Mickey Mouse short The Mad Doctor.
 * In Name Only. The Mad Doctor himself is closer to Mad Scientist. There's nothing doctorate or curing about his experiments.
 * Dr. Barber in The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack seems a little unhinged which really showed in the episode where everyone in Stormalong became infected with The Black Plague. He seemed like a kid in a candy store.
 * In another episode, he seemed really interested in performing surgery on Flapjack for something that wasn't serious in the first place. Added to the fact that he uses barber tools and doubles as a barber...
 * He was going to test Flapjack for blindness with a harpoon. Although it sort of makes sense; if he wasn't blind, he would probably move before he got impaled through the face.
 * AAAHH!!! Real Monsters featured the "Monster Doctor", whose idea of medicine included using the earth prong on an electrical plug to give someone a third nostril. A runaway Ickis was seen walking across the camera despite not being responsible, causing his friends to believe he was responsible. Hilarity Ensued.
 * One episode of Mucha Lucha was actually about an evil doctor who threatened to remove the Flea's spleen as a result of a prank the Flea played on him just so he can use said spleen to create a monster made entirely out of internal organs. However, it then turns out that the spleen actually escaped the Flea's body prior to the episode's events, and the spleen for some reason, is three times the size of the Flea himself.
 * When the title character of Rocko's Modern Life gets a nasty case of the flu, he goes to see a doctor who turns out to be an unhinged mental patient. The doctor's bizarre treatments include giving Rocko a prostate exam and shoving his hand through both of Rocko's ears to extract a large buildup of ear wax, but amazingly enough, they work.

Real Life

 * Dr. Josef Mengele, SS officer and doctor at the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, and the Trope Codifier.
 * Dr. Theodor Morell turned his own Führer into a guinea pig - for almost 8 years he doused him with compounds of strychnine, atropine, amphetamines, cocaine, even goddamn metamphetamine. And he got away with it. Colonel Stauffenberg's bomb brought him a death sentence even as it did much less damage to Hitler's health.
 * Dr. Harold Shipman.
 * Dr. Graeme Reeves.
 * The leaders of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.
 * Shiro Ishii, man in charge of the Unit 731 during the Japanese Occupation of China.
 * Ikuo Hayashi, the Minister of Health for Aum Shinrikyo, ran a "hospital" for Aum members that used them as guinea pigs.
 * Herman Webster Mudgett, better known by his alias: H. H. Holmes was one of America's first documented serial killers. He built a hotel containing gas chambers and secret chutes to dispose of the bodies. After killing his victims, he would usually dissect them and keep the parts he liked.
 * Played for laughs by Dave Barry in various columns, where he tends to theorize that the "medical treatment" doctors provide generally consists of them performing sadistic tests on you until you are smart enough to pretend whatever you came in for is better. He also describes prostate exams like this (though in contrast, the doctor who performs those tests comes across better).