A third-rate artist, a failed seminarian, a drop-out teacher. They don’t sound a threatening trio. But between them they were responsible for the deaths of around 150 million people.
Neither Hitler, Stalin nor Mao were medical men. But some recent lesser tyrants were doctors: Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier, Bosnian Serb Radovan Karadžić, and Bashar al-Assad of Syria among others.
Papa Doc’s work on controlling yaws won him humanitarian accolades, but when he entered politics he was drawn into Haiti’s voodoo culture and thousands lost their lives.