Book Review

'Blind Eye' by James Stewart

A doctor’s trail of suspicious deaths goes unchecked

Sunday, September 05, 1999

By Steve Twedt, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Early in James B. Stewart’s book, one begins to sense how differently this true-life tale will unfold from most murder mysteries: The suspense comes not in wondering how it will end, but how it can possibly continue for 250 more pages.

Before the first cup of coffee is gone, we learn that the book’s central figure, Michael Swango, a resident physician at Ohio State University, has an inexplicable habit of being nearby when seemingly stable patients suddenly die.

The book makes a convincing argument that this is no coincidence.

Stewart interviews a nurse who noticed Swango walk into one patient’s room and empty a syringe into the woman’s central line. Seconds later, the woman has stopped breathing and the nurse is frantically trying to revive her with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while Swango passively watches from the back of the room.

That same night, a 59-year-old woman who’d undergone back surgery also suddenly stopped breathing. This time, the patient survived to report that a doctor matching Swango’s description had injected her, then had run from the room. Almost immediately, she felt “a blackness” overcome her, paralyzing her.

Since Swango’s arrival, nurses had noticed a marked increase in the number of patients who had suddenly stopped breathing -- a full year’s worth in just a few months.

Deaths had increased, too, but as troubling as their sheer number were the profiles of the dead patients: a young gymnast, a 21-year-old man, then a 43-year-old man.

None of the patients had seemed close to death. In each case, Swango was working on the floor when they unexpectedly stopped breathing.

The nurses and Swango’s fellow residents reported their suspicions. Surely, the reader thinks, a full and thorough investigation will follow and those in charge will make sure Swango is kept away from patients until his actions, and mental state, are checked. The thick fold of unread pages in my right hand tells me it won’t be so simple.

Therein is the horror behind the horror of Stewart’s account of Swango. As the body count mounts, obvious questions about his role in the deaths are either not asked or undergo only a cursory inquiry. Stewart describes sloppy investigations and denied truths, all driven by a wish to limit bad publicity, the fear of liability and the disbelief among other doctors that one of their own could coldly murder patients.

Stewart has produced an extraordinary book, but not one that will comfort anyone due for a hospital stay soon. Even more than Walt Bogdanich’s acclaimed “The Great White Lie,” Stewart’s book carries a sobering message:

You can’t always count on hospitals or fellow doctors to keep bad doctors away from your bedside.

Even as the deaths continue, Swango is allowed to move from one residency program to another, aided by hospital officials who refuse to share what they know with their counterparts in other states.

At one point, when police in Illinois ask Ohio State officials about Swango’s background, they are turned away. Even after Swango is convicted of poisoning an ambulance crew in Illinois, he later bluffs his way into a New York Veterans Administration hospital by claiming that felony battery conviction came from a barroom brawl. No one verified his story.

The trail of suspicious deaths follows Swango overseas, too. Fleeing a growing number of questions, Swango volunteers in a remote village in Zimbabwe. The townspeople’s initial gratitude that the handsome American doctor would forgo a lucrative career in his homeland for them soon turns to horror as patients under his care die shortly after he visits them with a syringe.

Stewart, who won a Pulitzer Prize at the Wall Street Journal, does not leaven his belief in Swango’s guilt (the book’s subtitle is “How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away with Murder”).

As a matter of law, Swango has never been convicted for any deaths even though Stewart says the FBI believes he may have killed 60 people. Swango did serve time for the nonfatal poisoning of the ambulance crew, and he is currently imprisoned in Oregon for applying to the New York VA program under false pretenses, hardly a capital crime. He’s eligible for release early next year.

With his record, Swango should not be able to practice medicine anywhere in America again. But he’s shown that he’s willing to leave the country to find a hospital that will welcome him.

If he does, America’s medical establishment will bear some of the blame if Swango ever again lays a malicious hand on an unsuspecting patient.