Britain's procedure for vetting doctors is imperfect at the best of times - almost as porous as in Australia where an eighth medic was this morning arrested in connection with the British car bomb plots. No better example exists than Dr Maurice Raad, a chubby South African who in April 2001 turned up as our village doctor in Tasmania.
During his 22-day stint, before he was escorted to Hobart airport, Dr Raad sowed a trail of exceptional devastation, beginning with his injection - probably of sugar water - to my son Max.
The gravest case was a man with
back trouble to whom Raad (right) administered a spinal injection. "The patient was paralysed for three days," a nurse told me grimly. "I dealt with him for the next 12 months, trying to stop him committing suicide."
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The medical freemasonry, whether in Britain or Australia, is just as
protective as the Catholic Church, but it took only a phone call to find that Raad had been struck off the medical register in South Africa, not once but on three separate occasions. Eventually, I managed to secure Raad's medical files.
In 1982, Maurice Saadien-Raad, as
he then styled himself, was 'purported to have performed an adeno-tonsillectomy on Nicolette Murtagh whereas the patient was subsequently found still to have tonsils'. He had attempted to perform a tonsillectomy on Nadene Vesta Kruger having 'negligently failed to observe that her tonsils had already been removed'.
He had also examined a patient
complaining of severe menstrual flow 'without detecting a large cystic mass the size of a 16-weeks pregnancy in her abdomen'. In  |
