Agatha Christie’s doctors (BMJ 2010;341:c6438)—web appendix Herbert G Kinnell Incompetent doctors Newly qualified Dr Sarah King thinks the murder victim in Appointment with Death died of natural causes. A couple of “tame psychiatrists” are mentioned in Crooked House. The rich wife‟s doctor is an incompetent in A Caribbean Mystery. In The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding we hear hospital treatment being compared unfavourably with previous times: “Ah, doctors nowadays, they have you out of hospital before you can hardly stand on your feet.” Aunt Ada in By the Pricking of My Thumbs says: “That‟s how doctors make their living. Giving them boxes and boxes and bottles and bottles of tablets. Yellow tablets, pink tablets, green tablets, even black tablets … Brimstone and treacle they used to use in my grandmother‟s day. I bet they were as good as anything …” The murderous Dr Roberts in Cards on the Table falsely claims: “When we poison our patients it‟s entirely by accident.” The GP in The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor concludes that his 45 years of medical experience is sometimes “not worth a jot.” The arrogant, insolent, “obstinate as a pig” Dr Adams in The Cornish Mystery insists vehemently that the poisoned dentist died from gastritis. Poirot responds that if a doctor “lacks doubt he is not a doctor, he is an executioner.” Dr Stillingfleet believes the millionaire‟s murder is suicide in The Dream. In Endless Night Dr Shaw, a main character in the novel, goes largely unnoticed, even though one character comments: “Some doctor or other is always giving them powders and pills, stimulants or pep pills, or tranquillisers, things that on the whole they‟d be better without.” Dr Burton in The House of Lurking Death opines that three recent poisonings of people in big houses were down to socialist agitation. However, not all of Christie‟s doctors are incompetent, with one even boasting in The Case of the Caretaker that he has solved the case and goads Miss Marple to see if she can match his conclusion.

Doctors with foibles Dr Blacklock in A Murder is Announced is a fierce tyrant who has “probably killed hundreds of patients,” and refuses to allow his daughter to have an operation for her disfiguring goitre. The unnamed greedy GP also makes his inevitable appearance in Taken at the Flood, charging 20 guineas for vitamins: he steals his morphia-addicted patient‟s vials of the drug and replaces them with castor oil, to fuel his own morphine addiction. Likewise one of the two doctors in another Poirot story, The Sittaford Mystery, has been struck off, probably for drug abuse, and attempts to extort money. Virologist Dr Louis Barron in Destination Unknown is described as willing to “sell his grandmother to the knackers‟ yard to get equipment for his work.” Of the „„unpleasant-looking brute‟‟ Dr Horriston, who appears in Partners in Crime—The Case of the Missing Lady, Tuppence says that the doctor gives: “injections of some sort (armadillo glands), and he makes a deadly secret of it, and charges through the nose. I daresay he is a quack—but he‟s a damned successful one!” He and the Austrian Dr Kleber, who could double as a concentration camp doctor, run a private slimming clinic where the „„missing lady‟‟ is strapped to a bed to receive the quack treatment. Dr Lutz in The Erymanthian Boar is a plastic surgeon for criminals and also pretends to be a psychoanalyst. In The Case of the Rich Woman bogus medic Dr Claudius Constantine makes a lady sign away her power of attorney to him after drugging her and he tries to treat patients by using a transmigration of souls technique. In The Dream, which featured a murdered millionaire who had dreamt of suicide, three doctors come up with bizarre interpretations of dreams. The murder victim in The Hollow is arrogant married philanderer Dr John Cristo, who abuses his private Harley Street patients. He reveals their names to his friends, and tries out experimental drugs on them to try to cure “Ridgeways Disease”.