Doctor's Disgraceful Demotion

Medic: Vait, vait, vait, it gets better. Vhen zhe patient voke up, his skeleton vas missing, and zhe doctor vas never heard from again!
[Medic and Heavy laugh uproariously]
Medic: Anyvey... zhat's how I lost my medical license, heh.
Heavy: [worried expression]

— Team Fortress 2, "Meet the Medic"

There's a reason why Mad Doctors and Mad Scientists (and sometimes other kinds of evil doctors, such as the Depraved Dentist and Psycho Psychologist) work in secret underground labs and not in public hospitals where they have to follow inconvenient rules like codes of ethics and the Hippocratic oath. They might have started there, but then they were fired because... well, they'd love to tell you that story themselves. It's a darkly hilarious (or just plain dark) story about how they lost their medical license, usually for performing some kind of gruesome, horrifying experiment For Science! (quite possibly on a random person they chose as a test subject without asking consent). Bonus points if they're telling it to the poor sap on their operating table.

When it's Played for Laughs, it's usually a Noodle Incident because it's funnier that way, but it's more likely to be spelled out in full if it's being played for horror. Of course, the scary version can also be a Noodle Incident complete with a Gory Discretion Shot or two — Nothing Is Scarier, after all.

The doctor's attitude towards their lost medical license also depends on how seriously they're taken by the narrative. If they're a jovial, Affably Evil sort, they'll probably laugh it off. If they're a Well-Intentioned Extremist trying to save lives or cure a deadly disease, they'll nurse a grudge against whoever stopped their morally dubious research in its tracks. In the latter case, they'll defend their actions and claim they were for the greater good.

This trope is frequently the reason why a doctor joins up with a villain or villainous organization. They got caught breaking the law and now nobody will hire them, but along came this mysterious group that promised them all the funds they needed, the freedom to continue their research, and an endless supply of (probably not very willing) test subjects, and the offer was just too good to turn down. If the doctor's and the villains' lack of morals happen to line up, even better.

Sub-trope of Back-Alley Doctor, Dr. Jerk, and Morally Ambiguous Doctorate. If the character telling the story is a villain, they might be Reminiscing About Their Victims. They're also likely to say, "They Called Me Mad!" and/or "I Did What I Had to Do!" Related to Meatgrinder Surgery, Backstory Horror, Noodle Incident, and Medical Horror.

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind: When Cioccolata was working as a surgeon, he would deliberately give his patients the wrong dose of anesthetic so they would wake up mid-operation, allowing him to enjoy seeing them in agonizing pain. He was fired after killing one of his patients but didn't get arrested because the murder was mistaken for an accident. Now he works for Passione as the boss's personal Torture Technician, and even said boss (who is no saint himself) thinks Cioccolata is an abhorrent human being, very rarely makes use of him and is disgusted with himself whenever he has to do so.

Comic Books

• Batman: Linda Friitawa, a.k.a. 'Fright', is a geneticist who lost her license for illegally experimenting on human subjects.

Film — Live-Action

• Alien³: Dr. Jonathan Clemens was sent to the penal planet of Fury 161 because he was addicted to morphine and accidentally killed eleven accident victims because he prescribed the wrong dosage of painkillers while high. After his sentence was over, he remained as their doctor, both to atone and because no-one else would hire him.
• Clue: Professor Plum was a psychiatrist until he lost his license for having a fling with one of his "lady patients".
• Evolution (2001): Dr. Kane lost face with the military after he developed a vaccine for them that had a wide variety of unpleasant side effects. As such, he ended up teaching Biology to indifferent college kids in a small town.
• In Legion (1998), Major Doyle recruits a The Dirty Dozen-style team of death-row prisoners. One of them is a female Mad Doctor who's a religious maniac.
  Fleming: Jones, field MD. Served in a POW enemy hospital. Did unnecessary surgery on enemy soldiers, with lethal results. Eight died.
  Jones: I am a soldier of God. I just acted on command. The Angel of Death is my superior officer.
• Minority Report: After going on the run, Precrime cop John Anderton goes to a back-alley surgeon to get his eyes replaced to evade the retinal scans. Only after he's been injected with drugs does he realise the surgeon is a Mad Doctor he put in prison for setting his own patients on fire, just so he could demonstrate his skills. Luckily for John, the doctor is grateful for being sent to jail, as it gave him the time he needed to continue studying medicine in the prison library.

Literature

• The Boys from Brazil: Doctor Josef Mengele escapes the fall of the Third Reich and flees to Brazil. For his part in wicked experiments on humans, Mengele was stripped of all credentials and branded a war criminal. Nevertheless, Mengele secretly continues to conduct his Magnum Opus experiment: creating clones of Adolf Hitler, which have been seeded with foster parents in foreign countries.
• The Godfather: Jules Segal lost his license for performing underground abortions and has to settle for the still-underdeveloped Las Vegas. Later, Michael Corleone helps him to get a clinic.
• The Island of Doctor Moreau:
  • Moreau was formerly a highly respected and prestigious London doctor, but wound up in obscurity on his island after the press exposed his horrifying vivisection experiments on animals.
  • Moreau's assistant, Montgomery, was once an up-and-coming medical student, but lost all social standing and job prospects after a possibly criminal alcohol-fueled Noodle Incident. As a result, he accepted Moreau's job offer, since it was the only one.
• Joe Pickett: Dr. Eric Logue, the Big Bad in Trophy Hunt. A former army surgeon, he was dishonorably discharged from the army and sent to a military prison for conducting unnecessary surgery on prisoners of war.
• Pet Sematary: Before completely losing his grip on sanity, Dr. Louis Creed muses that he can take his revived son with him and become a paramedic at Disney World, since he would almost sure to lose his medical license.
• The Seven Per Cent Solution: When Sherlock Holmes meets Doctor Sigmund Freud, a Sherlock Scan of Freud's office leads to Holmes deducing that the doctor has become a pariah among his medical peers, and subsists purely as a private practitioner. "These blank spaces on the wall where certificates and awards would be. One might become disenfranchised with one or two, but not all six at once. No, doctor, I deduce it was they who became appalled by you, and withdrew their credentials."
• The Ship Who...: In PartnerShip, Alpha never actually got a doctorate, but had been well on her way. Her focus in university was researching ways to treat Ganglicide exposure — the trouble is, she needed a steady influx of subjects that had been exposed in the first place. She could keep and test on rabbits, but found them smelly and annoying, and if people thought she had pets they would want to talk about them! So she started kidnapping Disposable Vagrants, claiming they weren't doing society any good as they were. This was discovered and should have led to serious consequences, but because of her connections it was hushed up, she was denied her license... and sent to work in a clinic in a distant system. Naturally, she immediately continued to use her medical knowledge for evil.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Qyburn lost his maester's chain (the Westerosi equivalent of a medical license) for cutting up the bodies of living patients to study their insides. While working as The Medic for the Bloody Mummers, he dissects live prisoners. Later, he's given permission by Cersei Lannister to continue his experiments in the castle dungeons.
• In the first The Stainless Steel Rat novel, Jim DiGriz disguises himself by getting extensive plastic surgery from a doctor who lost his license for alcoholism.
• The Wheel of Time: The legendary Torture Technician Semirhage used to be one of history's greatest Healers until it came out that she tortured her patients for fun. In a viewpoint chapter, she muses on how her patients seemed to think a bit of agony was a fair price for their lives, and on how unfair it was that Magical Society tried to force her to stop.

Live-Action TV

• In Dr. Death season one, Christopher Duntsch loses his medical license after multiple instances of malpractice during surgery and goes to prison for life. In season two, Paolo Macchiarini is unfortunately only given a slap on the wrist by the Swedish courts for killing numerous patients, and goes on to continue practicing medicine.
• Taiga Hanaya a.k.a. Kamen Rider Snipe from Kamen Rider Ex-Aid is an unlicensed Back-Alley Doctor who used to be the first Kamen Rider employed by the heroes' CR Center, and is said to have had his license revoked because he became obsessed with the power of the Gashats that the doctor Riders use, resulting in the death of a patient who was Hiiro Kagami a.k.a. Kamen Rider Brave's girlfriend. The later episodes and the Episode ZERO miniseries go into further detail about his Start of Darkness, revealing that he was attempting to treat the patient's illness, but overuse of the Proto-Gashat was too much for him to handle and he failed to terminate the Graphite Bugster, resulting in Graphite's completion and Saki Momose succumbing to her game disease.
• One of the antagonists in Kingdom Hospital has this as his backstory. He'd gotten in trouble for botching a surgery and it cost him his reputation, getting him kicked out of his cushy New York Hospital and sent to the titular one. He's so arrogant that he actually starts to believe that the botched surgery was orchestrated by a conspiracy still trying to ruin his life.
• Murder Rooms: In "The Photographer's Chair", Dr. Bell has a barbed conversation with the coroner, who only maintains his position due to being in the same Masonic Lodge as the chief constable. Afterwards Dr. Bell fills in Doyle on the man's notorious past.
  "To begin with, his surgical technique was remarkable. Swift and steady. But then, alcohol became his master. One spectacularly botched operation was his downfall. His surgical saw, amputated his own two fingers, the patient's leg and a pair of perfectly healthy testicles."
• The Punisher (2017): In "The Whirlwind", Billy Russo goes to a Back-Alley Doctor after being shot. The doctor tries to get him to go to a proper hospital instead. "Look, there's a reason I'm here and not Mount Sinai, okay? It ain't my bedside manner."
• Squid Game: Player 111 is a doctor who has entered the Deadly Game due to an incident of malpractice. His medical expertise gets him recruited for the guards' Organ Theft racket.

Music

• MILGRAM: Prisoner No. 5, Shidou Kirisaki, is a doctor who took organs from brain-dead patients and transplanted them into patients who needed them and had more chance of recovery. Unlike most examples of this trope, however, he has realized how terrible his crimes are, and is even requesting the death penalty.

Tabletop Games

• Some Genius in Genius: The Transgression have this trope in their background. Indeed, some were so angry at losing their license or their patients that it was their Catalyst.

Video Games

• Borderlands: One of Dr. Zed's recurring lines is about how he lost his medical license.
• Overwatch: Moira's backstory is that she is a scientist who garnered infamy by publishing a controversial paper about genetic manipulation. Many thought her work was inherently unethical and questioned her methodology. It ruins her reputation and forces her to seek underground funding for her projects, which is why she accepts the offer to join Overwatch's covert ops division Blackwatch by Reaper, who she later experiments on, giving him the supernatural abilities he is now known for and that are similar to her own, as well as the mental instability his character is known for. When Overwatch is disbanded, her continued search for underground funding leads her to join the villainous group Talon.
• Persona 5: Dr. Tae Takemi, the Death Confidant, appears to be this on the surface, and she even calls herself a quack. Her deal with Joker is to provide medicine for purchase with no questions asked in exchange for Joker acting as a Guinea pig in her drug research. But as her story unfolds, it turns out that she was actually a prodigy who got burned by her erstwhile boss, a Green-Eyed Monster with mediocre skills but abundant connections. After changing her boss's heart, he's arrested for malpractice and Takemi completes her research on a previously incurable disease, her reputation being restored, and she's invited back to the university hospital she previously worked for.

Web Animation

• Team Fortress 2: In "Meet the Medic", while Heavy is on Medic's operating table, Medic is telling him a funny story about a patient who woke up with his skeleton missing, and finishes it with, "...anyway, zat's how I lost my medical license!" causing Heavy to stop laughing and look worried.

Web Videos

• Unwanted Houseguest: Doctor Litchfield actually had his licensed revokes years ago. He's continuing his illegal experiments in secret.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Saint", a minor character loses his medical license for testing a serum on Gumball and Darwin which causes horrific mutations.
• American Dragon: Jake Long: "Professor" Rottwood believes in the existence of magical creatures, much like another public school teacher. Unfortunately for Rottwood, when he presented his evidence of such, it was not seen as quirky by his peers, but rather an affront to scientific discovery and egregious misuse of research funds. He was summarily stripped of his accreditation and reduced to teaching middle school while continuing to harangue others about his crackpot theories, a fact he finds very insulting.
• Batman: The Animated Series: The episode "Paging the Crime Doctor" features Dr. Matthew Thorne, who functions as a private surgeon for Gotham's mob. He's forced to do this because some years ago he lost his license to practice when he took a bullet out of his brother, mob boss Rupert Thorne, and failed to report the incident to the police. He's actually played for tragedy as he regrets the loss of his license, and more than suspects Rupert set him up as the Crime Doctor more to take advantage of his talents than as a way to help him continue to practice. By the end of the episode, Bruce Wayne is offering to help him get his license back in exchange for stories about Matthew's old medical school classmate, Thomas Wayne.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: Before he became the Depraved Dentist supervillain Knightbrace, Mr. Jelly was kicked out of dental school for trying to put braces on babies. Now he runs around trying to force torturous dental treatments on children.
• Star Wars: The Bad Batch: When Tech reads the bio of Doctor Hemlock, he notes that Hemlock was expelled from the Republic's Science Corps for "unorthodox and unethical experiments". They then find out that this guy was hired by the Empire and given the imprisoned clone troopers as guinea pigs. Just in case we needed any more reasons to hate the Empire.

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