In news that has captivated the country for weeks, Dr Nandipha Magudumana has been scrutinised for numerous suspected illegal activities.
Magudumana, whose licence was allegedly revoked by the HPCSA in 2021, is suspected of aiding and abetting the escape of convicted rapist and murderer Thabo Bester.
According to claims, she is also being probed to see if she was complicit in transporting her criminal lover across the border.
However, how are those in this career field expected to act?
Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath at graduation, a solemn commitment that they would endeavour not to hurt anybody.
Societal norms also dictate that doctors have high morals and values and be outstanding citizens. However, some brazenly ignore these expectations and commit gruesome crimes.
Here are four doctors who violated the Hippocratic Oath:
Dr Harold Shipman
It is estimated that this English doctor killed 250 people. Shipman practised general medicine.
According to reports, from 1975 to 1998, he murdered at least 215 patients, the vast majority of them were elderly women.
His modus operandi was to overdose his victims with deadly heroin injections. Court reports detail that he tried to cover up his crimes by falsifying patient records.
He obtained many life sentences for his atrocities and died by suicide in a jail cell in 2004.
Dr Marcel Petiot
A Frenchman, Petiot preyed on some of the most vulnerable people in the 20th century. He killed a confirmed 23 people but authorities suspected that this figure was much higher.
When World War II was wreaking havoc in the European country, Petiot pretended to be a leader of the French Resistance and lured those who sought to flee from the Nazis to their deaths.
He would allegedly promise to move them to South America through Portugal if they paid him an enormous sum of money and received an immunisation injection.
This shot, however, would be lethal, and once his victims perished, Petiot would take their possessions.
Dr Henry Howard Holmes
Holmes holds the grisly honour of being one of the US’s first serial killers.
‘’I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing,’’ he was quoted as saying.
He kicked off his morbid habits as a student by stealing dead bodies from the University of Michigan to utilise in bogus insurance claims.
Dr Holmes designed a murder house in Chicago, equipped with secret tunnels, trapdoors, soundproof cells, locked doors and gas jets to smother his victims.
He even had a furnace in the basement to burn the corpses, but he also sold some to local medical institutes as cadavers.
When he was apprehended and put to death in 1894, he confessed to 27 killings, however, experts say he may have killed up to 200 people.
Dr Joseph Swango
Swango, from the US, murdered people in his home country as well as in Zimbabwe. He reportedly killed 60 of his patients.
Nurses reported an upsurge in the number of seemingly healthy patients who died suddenly during his surgical internship. They voiced their concerns with authority, but after an investigation, Swango was cleared of any misconduct in 1984.
After his internship, he got a job as an emergency medical technician, but he was caught after several of his co-workers fell seriously ill from poisoning (allegedly, he spiked their coffees with arsenic) and sentenced to five years in prison.
He eventually landed a position at a hospital in New York. However, as in the past, patients began to die for no apparent reason.
Swango was sacked after the hospital discovered he had lied on his application and had a poisoning conviction, and the FBI was following him.
This did not end here for this devious medical professional.
He escaped to Zimbabwe in 1994, where he obtained employment at a mission hospital using fake credentials. His patients began dying under mysterious circumstances like clockwork.
On a layover in Chicago in 1997, federal authorities arrested him for fraud. Detectives uncovered the remains of three of Swango's victims, all of whom carried lethal medicines, after becoming certain that he was a serial killer.
Authorities in both states charged him with several murders. He pleaded guilty due to facing the death penalty in both countries.
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