Finally happened across this little tidbit: in his 1989 autobiography, Sen. Bill Frist ® freely admits that while he was a young student at Harvard Med he would frequent the local animal shelters and adopt cute fuzzy kitties, promising the shelter that he would give them a good and loving home.
He would then take the cats home and perform all manner of surgical vivisection and amateur medical experiments on said cute fuzzy kitties!
Naturally he now affirms, in proper politico fashion, that what he did was wrong and he expresses remorse. I certainly agree with him that it was textbook “wrong” behavior. In fact, most people who do that sort of thing find themselves either in jail or a mental hospital, and certainly on some kind of serial killer watch list. But in the post-Lott GOP-world, they hand you the keys to the kingdom (blacks vote, cats don’t).
Allow me to rephrase: Aieeee!! Dicing up kittycats for personal enlightenment?! Sick fuck! What did you use for anaethesia? Nothing? I dare you to run for President! Ripper! Gah! And the GOP holding you up as a role model! Jeez!
He lied to individuals at city-run services, stating loads of love and good intentions, which all turned out to be a load of hooey.
He then used the fruits of those deceptions to further his own agenda, leading to his own ascension into a situation that allowed him to make boocoo bucks, achieve personal power, and eventually got him where he is today.
Hell, the man sounds like the living symbol of The Modern Republican…
RTA, considering the fact that Dr. Frist is fairly well-regarded as a surgeon, maybe the practice on the cats wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Med students have to learn on something before they can learn on humans, and the classes they take in school also involve “surgery” on cats and dogs. Yeah, I know it’s oogy, but until something better comes along, that’s the best we can do.
Yeah, but people take their cats to the animal shelter hoping they’ll get adopted. Quite a few shelters don’t put their animals to sleep on just that basis.
While we don’t know if Frist actually went to THAT kind of shelter, I somehow don’t think it crossed his mind NOT to.
In short, he lied to people to get what he wanted and advance his career.
I’m sure he dissected cadavers while in medical school, but I think if he’d made a point of getting them by adopting children from orphanages, someone might have made a noise, yes?
So MsRobyn, the ends always, always justify the means?
Med students everywhere, they should feel unsatisfied with the plentiful and already dead and prepped specimens they are provided in school, and should naturally seek out their own living, adoptable specimens for home study, so they can be as “well-regarded” (read “famous”) as Bill Frist?
How many doctors in fiction have we seen, who arrogantly assert that their heinous methods only provide them further with godlike powers of life and death?
Ideally these aberrations are restricted to fiction, but we have seen an assertion that insinuates that whatever doctors want to do to futher their abilities is OK.
Well, the local animal shelters had to have known what was going on–here’s this young med student, coming back again for another cat…
Sad to say, I think some animal shelter employees are just happy to get the animals off their hands. Wishful thinking? Denial? Or just not giving a shit? Who knows?
I’ve never been through med school myself, but I wonder if it’s SOP for medical students to go find their own animals to experiment on. I’m betting that it’s not, that this was just his own idea.
And actually, I think I’ll go over to GQ and ask the Doper Doctors. Excuse me…
Doper doc here. Nope, I never went out and found animals to cut up. Med school supplied us with pigs (dogs had too many parasites) and we did surgery on them. It was always emphasized to us that we had to give proper post-op care, especially pain medication. Did they suffer? Certainly. Did they die? Sure. We were in training. Were there alternatives? Nothing quite so good. I want the surgeon opening up my kid to have tons of experience. And if he went to a school where they were unable or unwilling to provide animals to practice on, I can see a legitimate need for learning on one’s own. I would hope the med school would have more resources than that.
My daughter has cystic fibrosis and diabetes related to her CF. If her doctor (whom I trust) tells me that she thinks she can understand the diseases better and discover better therapies by sawing off the top of a monkey’s skull and hooking up its brains to a car battery with a pair of jumper cables, all I can say is “Red is positive, black is negative”.
As far a “nice dead cadavers” go, I don’t know about med school, but I know if vet school all the practice surgerys are terminal: after the animal sucessfully comes out of anesthesia, it is put down. Which, if you think about it, makes sense: why spend the money nursing an animal after surguery when you could spend that same money keeping two of three animals alive at a shelter longer, and increase their chances for adoption.
Except the animals aren’t pre-dead or prepped for surgery classes in med school.
I’m sorry if dissecting cute little kitty cats bothers you, RTA. I think you’re confusing animal torture, which is pathological, with desire to learn and improve one’s skill, which is not.
Dr. Frist is well-regarded because he is an excellent surgeon with a reputation for helping his patients. I think that if someone you loved or you yourself needed surgery, you’d want someone as good as he. That can only come through training and practice.
Hey, I’m not beefin’ about the man dissecting animals.
I’m beefin’ about the man lying to people in order to obtain them.
If he obtained them from a medical supply place, a place that breeds animals for sale to vet schools or med schools or whatever, I would have nothing to say here.
…but I think lying to animal shelter employees in order to obtain animals under false pretenses shows a definite lack of moral fiber, there. Not that most politicians are oversupplied with that commodity, anyway, but that particular manifestation bothers me…
He used the fruits of those deceptions to become a frigging doctor. Not as in ‘Dr.Evil’, but as in ‘Thanks for developing those new organ-transpant methods, doctor’.
How many animals in shelters are actually adopted? When I was at our local shelter recently to see if our runaway dog had been picked up, the cages were loaded with dogs - sometimes 3-4 per cage. For the most part, they weren’t cute and cuddly with big sad eyes - they were forlorn, raggedy-looking, and destined to be destroyed. I had to steel myself because there was no way I could adopt one, and I knew what fate awaited them. I didn’t go past the cat cages, but I expect it was the same story.
So, is it better for the animal to be destroyed or used to learn something? Either way, it’s just as dead. Does a lie make it any deader?
I personally find it creepy as hell. Did he attend the Papa Doc Medical School? The doctors I know wouldn’t have had the time to be, um, “experimenting” on their own time whilst in med school.
Sorry,
Frist apoligists, but there is a HUGE difference between learning the craft of surgery by operating on animals in a supervised lab setting as part of the medical school curriculum and lying to an animal shelter to take kittens home to experiment on.
And by those standards Jeffrey Dahmer was just learning to be an executive chef, too?