Mad Doctor

aka: The Mengele

"I look forward to breaking you..."

"Well, that was fun! I'm glad you all enjoyed it. Did you enjoy it? You better have enjoyed it, or you're next on the operating table! Got a sniffle? Come to me! Oh, feel a scratch? Come to me! Oh, you bruised your elbow? I'll take out your kidneys and replace it with a brain! Two brains for the price of one! Hehehehehehehe!"

— Markiplier, after playing Surgeon Simulator 2013

Ah, medicine! The wonderful science of putting people back together... or pulling them apart.

Let's face it, there's just something inherently creepy about medical doctors. Their profession is one that centers around guts, organs, blood, and bones, things that could make the most hardened badass vomit on the spot and they don't even flinch during their operations day after day after day. They can take a knife to a man's flesh, open him up like a zip-lock bag, do lord-knows-what to the insides of their patients, and close them up again, ready for the next patient. And they're always so... jolly.

This guy? This guy is all of that wrongness collected and made real.

This is the guy that uses his knowledge of the workings of the body (or of the mind) to do evil, abuses the authority he has from his doctorate to practice freakish and horrific experiments, harvest organs or even providing Foul Medicines, proving that Science Is Bad. Nowadays, Predatory Big Pharma may be covering for him. If patients no longer want to see him, he may resort to kidnapping his test subjects. Why he treats them, and not him, is not clear.

Of course, for all his insanity, the doctor may in fact be a Bunny-Ears Lawyer who actually knows what he's doing. Patients may be terrified by the way he acts and the bizarre treatments he puts them through, but when the doctor is done with them they're actually cured.

This has happened often enough in Real Life (notable in the original trope name, "The Mengele", named after infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele) that there's a branch of medical ethics devoted to figuring out what you can do to your patients For Science!, and (at least in the USA) every hospital and university has a committee whose entire job is to oversee research with human subjects. It's generally agreed that you must tell people you're experimenting on them, why, what the risks are, what they get out of it, and give them the opportunity to say no. The Other Wiki has more information than you require.

A supertrope of Deadly Doctor (a combatant in medical garb) and Psycho Psychologist (psychologist/psychiatrist who commits evil/unethical/malicious deeds with his expertise). The counterpart of Mad Artist, Mad Mathematician, and Mad Scientist in the field of medicine (of course as with all the "Mad Genius" archetype sub-tropes, these are not mutually exclusive and often overlap — medicine does require scientific research and a Mad Artist could use expertise gained as a physician, mathematician and/or scientist in creating their insane artwork). Could be an Evilutionary Biologist. Some may have a Morally Ambiguous Doctorate. For unintentional examples, see Comically Inept Healing.

If the doctor in question is a Jerkass, then you have Dr. Jerk. Of course these two could overlap literally.

Compare Quirky Doctor.

Compare Depraved Dentist. noreallife

If you were looking for the Mickey Mouse short, see here.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A Partnership for a Drug-Free America ad from the 1980s had a doctor high on marijuana... This is a later remake.

Anime and Manga

• In Bleach, Mayuri Kurotsuchi and his Arrancar counterpart Szayelaporro Granz are overall Omnidisciplinary Mad Scientists, but they engage in medical side of things frequently enough to count. Both surgically modify their subordinates to serve themselves in inhuman capacity — Mayuri turns them into living bombs, Szayelaporro into living medkits.
• Dr. Muraki in Descendants of Darkness. Weirdly, he's actually an excellent doctor, except when he decides not to be. It's implied that he runs a successful medical clinic most of the time he's not doing things like vampirizing people for fun, trying to resurrect his dead brother's head, or "supplying" the black market (or another mad doctor) with organs taken from his victims and using them as bait for his favourite shinigami.
• Franken Fran is an oblivious Genki Girl example. She genuinely wants to save lives; the problem is that the concept of "quality of life" takes a backseat in the process.
• Fullmetal Alchemist has a bunch of mad doctors aiding the evil Government Conspiracy at various points, the most prominent of which are "The Man in White" (or "Gold Tooth") and Shou Tucker, the Sewing Life Alchemist.
• Herr Doktor from Hellsing, responsible for the monstrous state of the Last Battalion.
• Cioccolata from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind was a sadistic former surgeon who would operate on conscious patients and convince the elderly people he was "assisting" to commit suicide. He takes glee in watching people die and makes it a point to record the deaths of every victim on video — understandably, the boss of the gang he's a member of views him with nothing but scorn, and only calls for his help as a last resort.
• Hajime Hanafusa from Kengan Ashura is a brilliant surgeon with an unhealthy obsession with dissecting people he finds interesting, especially fighters. During his debut fight in the tournament, he reveals that he turned himself into a Cyborg by implanting swords made from his own femurs into his arms, modifying his brain to eliminate his sense of pain, loading high-pressure gas into his heels to deliver explosive jump kicks, and adding cardiac implants that kept his heart beating and allowed him to survive having his neck snapped.
• Nao's father from Midori Days. His biggest experiment is taking apart Midori from Seiji's arm.
• Kabuto from Naruto is a medical ninja who uses his expertise to manipulate his enemies and incapacitate them easily, with a healthy dose of Mad Scientist to go with it. He serves as The Dragon to Orochimaru, a full-on Mad Scientist obsessed with human experimentation.
• One Piece has the "Surgeon of Death" Trafalgar Law, who is a highly skilled and competent doctor who is known for being an extremely dangerous and cruel pirate.
• Faust VIII of Shaman King, who basically introduces himself by vivisecting Yoh's Muggle friend Manta, tearing open his own leg with a scalpel to replace a broken bone with one from one of his many skeletons and then revealing himself to be constantly high as hell on morphine. Between other things, he also carries around his dead wife's skeleton in his coat, he cut off his own legs to give said skeleton new legs after they got destroyed in battle, and at the start of the Shaman Fight, he does essentially nothing to break a fall from hundreds of feet in the air that would have killed him if he hadn't operated on himself right after crashing thanks to, again, constantly being high as hell on morphine. Of course, Defeat Means Friendship — a long time later.
• In Soul Eater, Franken Stein has a serious vivisection fixation, cutting apart and stitching back together his clothes, his house, his partner, his lunchbox, and apparently himself — one Shirtless Scene shows that he has a stitch pattern that wraps around his torso.
• Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee presents a subversion of this trope with the Dr. Thunderland Junior. He uses an eye patch and is obsessed with dissection, but besides that, he is shown to be a very kindhearted person who cares for others despite his ruthlessness. Also, his job actually helps people.
• Dr. Akihiro Kanou kicks off the plot of Tokyo Ghoul by crossing this with Mad Scientist. His research involves making Artificial Hybrids by implanting a Ghoul's predatory organ into a human and hoping it works out. When Kaneki confronts him over destroying his life, Dr. Kanou calmly explains that he's a doctor, and the experimental surgery he did saved Kaneki from dying.

Comedy and Jokes

• A joke in very bad taste: The Gypsies decided to establish their own hospital. Despite a shortage of physicians, they rejected repeatedly a nice old gentleman who called himself Mengele J., Retired Physician.
• Played for Laughs by Dave Barry in various columns, where he tends to theorize that the "medical treatment" doctors provide generally consists of them performing sadistic tests on you until you are smart enough to pretend whatever you came in for is better. He also describes prostate exams like this (though in contrast, the doctor who performs those tests comes across better).

Comic Books

• Batman: Because his own father was a physician, Batman takes criminal doctors very personally:
  • The Crime Doctor, who started as a Batman villain but then naturally became the nemesis of Doctor Mid-Nite, the resident metahuman physician.
  • From the department of Mad Psychiatry, we get the Scarecrow, who sometimes attaches syringes to his gloves and drives people insane with fear so he can study / watch for kicks.
  • After dropping the gun-toting, Hush evolved into this, performing heart surgery on Catwoman and throwing scalpels at Batman instead of knives.
  • Professor Pyg is equal parts this and Mad Artist; he kidnaps and surgically mutilates people into his idea of perfection before brainwashing them to be perfectly obedient.
  • Dr. Hugo Strange. Like Scarecrow, he's a psychologist who frequently works at Arkham Asylum in most adaptations, and experiments on his patients and does everything he can to prove he's better than Batman.
• Combat Kelly and his Deadly Dozen: In their final mission, the Deadly Dozen are sent to stop Dr. Sweikert, who is performing terrible experiments on patients in the name of medical science. After he captures Kelly and Laurie, he plans to operate on Laurie (without anesthetic) to remove her Achilles tendon and see if it can be replaced with steel wire.
  Dr. Sweikert: It is your legs I am interested in. Particularly the Achilles tendon. I intend to sever yours... then try to repair them with steel wire. If I am successful, it will be a major breakthrough to which you will have contributed a great deal — especially in view of the pain you will suffer!
• The Surgeon General from Give Me Liberty — quote: "Crime is not a disease. Disease is a crime."
• In Global Frequency #9, surgeons in a medical research facility became literally Mad Doctors after the leak of an experimental gas. The surgeons' pre-existing fascination with the inside of the human body escalated into fanatical worship, and so... "They went into the wards, where their volunteer patients were. And they used stem-cell technology and bioreactors to make things out of them. And they're all still alive."
• George "Sawbones" Zimmerman from Jonah Hex (2005) is a well-educated and cultured man who enjoys using his medical skills to torture and murder people.
• Dr. Demagol in the Knights of the Old Republic comics.
• Pain of Last Man Standing has a Ph.D in Psychopathy.
• Nexus featured a couple of these, most notably Dr. Xip.
  Dr. Xip was quite a pip
  He experimented
  On the demented
  And let their organs drip!
  • Arguably a subversion, because we don't know for certain whether he's guilty. He is accused of these crimes and is executed for them, but he denies the charges, and we never learn the truth.
• Dr. Jonas Harrow from Spider-Man, a Back-Alley Doctor who specializes in mind control and making supervillains.
• Teen Titans: When a rare virus outbreak threatens the lives of all the children in San Francisco, the hypochondriac Dr. Samuel Register (a.k.a. Zookeeper), infected with a mutant strain of the same virus, is willing to let the infected children die while he attempts to dissect the only known survivor for a cure for his own condition.
• Transformers:
  • From the Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen tie-in comics, we have Flatline, who's best summed up as Josef Mengele as a Transformer.
  • The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye has Pharma, who appears to have been a perfectly sane and exceptionally competent doctor until making a deal with the local squad of murderous torturers to protect his clinic and employees. It's implied that his sanity was eroding even before the deal was exposed and he Jumped Off the Slippery Slope. To further exacerbate things, the one who exposed the deal was his old friend and mentor, who he has a massive Inferiority Superiority Complex towards. The next time they meet, his behavior towards the guy veers into Yandere territory. He's even referred to as "The Mad Doctor" by his new teammates.
  • Transformers: Shattered Glass (the Mirror Universe, in which Decepticons are heroes and Autobots are evil) has Ratchet, the Autobot medic. In fact, any wounded bot gets sent to him not for repairs, but as a punishment. Ratchet himself actually means very well. However, he possesses an irresistible desire to "improve" his patients by adding them unwanted extra details, and then gets surprised when they express their disapproval. Rodimus, for example, was sent to have his missing hand replaced, and Ratchet decided to give him a buzzsaw instead.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1 villain Dr. Poison, with her focus in poisons and disease as a biological weapon, serves as a reminder that the Nazis were not the only Axis power performing experiments on human victims during WWII. There is also Dr. Psycho, a telepathic former psychologist who was Driven to Villainy due to being mocked for his dwarfism.

Fan Works

• Fandom-renowned RWBY fanfiction author Coeur Al'Aran's recurring Original Character Tsune is a light-hearted example. She's a fox Faunus who serves as Beacon's resident doctor, and although she does her job, she has a bit of a thing for observing pain in her patients, which is consistently Played for Laughs. In one fic, she even expresses reluctance to use drugs unless they're very necessary, decrying them as an abomination for their pain-numbing effects.
• Escape from the Moon: Spliced Genome is a biochemist and doctor who genetically engineered deadly viruses, and was working on an improved version of the Black Plague when she was finally captured.
• In the Star Wars fic Going Solo, Han and Leia are captured on a Lady Land planet and Han is stabbed in the arm in the process, the tip of the knife breaking off in his arm. Their captors send in a doctor who is already angry at the rebels for blowing up the Death Star with his wife and child on board. He insists on making the process of treating Han as painful as he possibly can, even giving Han a shot of a drug that prevents him from passing out and amplifies everything he's feeling. Han briefly thinks he may bleed to death and prevent the ordeal, but a tourniquet takes care of any chance of that. A scanner could show exactly where the knife tip is, but the doctor instead busies himself digging and probing through the flesh of Han's arm. It finally ends when Han loses it and slams his good arm into the guy's head. Chaos ensues, someone attacks Leia, and Han gets knocked unconscious trying to protect her. The doctor insists on waiting until Han wakes up to do anymore, but fortunately Luke finds the guy's forceps and is able to get the point out. Still, *yikes*.
• In The Nightmare House, Lana Loud has a nightmare where an evil paediatrician named Dr. Mitchell numbs her and brainwashes her into walking and talking the way he believes a "good girl" should; i.e. like a grade school girl in the 50's.
• In the Pony POV Series, Professor Kabuto Beetle, the Evil Genius of the Changelings. He rivals Twilight in terms of intellect, and has a Doctorate, but really likes performing horrid medical experiments on anypony he can get away with, and relishes doing so. He's so bad with this trope that the rest of the Changelings loath him.
• Slip Stitch, from Starlight Over Detrot, is the head of the Detrot Morgue and Ice-Cream Parlor, and has all the exuberance for his job as Pinkie Pie at her perkiest. He throws the best parties, but his enthusiasm For Science! puts many off, particularly when they read his autopsy notes.
  "Developed case of Wandering Torso Syndrome induced by not-quite-passing car. Remaining limbs may make excellent supports for credenza. Family did not seem to appreciate this fact."
• In This Bites!, Kureha seems to have rubbed off on Chopper a bit too much; when the latter hears from Cross about the typical treatment for small bone fractures, his thought process carries him away to the point where Cross is scared that the reindeer wants to dissect him.
  • And in Chapter 24, he comes close to doing so thanks to his experimentation with his Devil Fruit's human intelligence turning him into Mr. Hyde.

Film — Live-Action

• Anatomy has the Anti-Hippocratic Society, a secret society of doctors who want to conduct experiments without caring for ethics.
• The Assignment (2016): Dr. Rachel Jane is an arrogant though highly skilled surgeon with delusions of grandeur who's been stripped of her license for illegal experiments. After that, she operates illegally in an underground clinic, performing more experiments on homeless people for what she claims is advancing medical knowledge. However, when a hitman murders her brother, she subjects him to a sex reassignment both to punish and change him (supposedly) for the better. After he kills most of her employees, plus shooting her, in revenge, she's found out by the police and sent to a mental institution.
• In The Awful Dr. Orloff, Dr. Orloff is a former prison doctor who abducts beautiful women from nightclubs and tries to use their skin to repair his daughter's fire-scarred face.
• In Circus of Horrors, Doctor Rossiter/Schüler is obsessed with perfecting his revolutionary plastic surgery techniques.
• In The Climax, Dr. Hohner is the physician at the Theatre Royal and a Crazy Jealous Guy. To prevent Angela from singing, he firstly hypnotizes her to be unable to sing, and later attempts to surgically remove her tongue.
• Beverly in Dead Ringers falls into this when he begins to suffer from delusions that his patients have Bizarre Human Biology and commissions nightmarish surgical instruments to treat them with.
• Dr. Giggles has two of these in Dr. Evan Rendell, who cut out people's hearts in a mad bid to resurrect his wife, and his son Evan Jr., the title character.
• Escape from L.A.: The Surgeon General of Beverly Hills, a plastic surgery freak who regularly has people kidnapped, then dissects them so that he can recycle their body parts for himself and his brethren.
• The Evil That Men Do: Holland is hired to murder Dr. Clement Molloch, a doctor who advises South American dictatorships on how to torture people.
• Frankenstein 1970: As well as being a Mad Scientist, Victor is an accomplished surgeon. When describing a concentration camp commandant who was found with his tongue cut out (implicitly by Victor), Victor remarks that it was a 'beautiful piece of surgery'.
• In Get Out (2017), neurosurgeon Roman Armitage, after losing to Jesse Owens in the Olympics, developed a surgical procedure to transfer the consciousness of older white people into young, healthy African-American bodies. His son Dean, who's also a neurosurgeon and just as immoral, remains part of Roman's twisted Cult, the Order of the Coagula, regularly operating on the poor black victims who his family members have hypnotized, kidnapped and/or tricked into visiting their house.
• House on Haunted Hill (1999): In 1931, the patients at the Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane revolt with Prison riot against the staff headed by the sadistic Dr. Richard B. Vannacutt.
• In Jack the Ripper (1976), Jack is really Dr. Orloff, a physician who spends his days helping the poor of the East End, and his nights murdering prostitutes and using his surgical expertise to take them apart.
• In Man in the Attic, Slade is a pathologist who puts his medical training to psychotic use as Jack the Ripper.
• In The Man with Nine Lives, Dr. Leon Kravaal is single-mindedly devoted to perfecting his freezing therapy, which he believes will be a Cure for Cancer. His dedication ultimately transforms into obsession, and he starts using his enemies as human guinea pigs for his experiments.
• Dr. Igor Markoff in The Monster Maker is a specialist in glandular conditions. He has developed both a means of infecting people with acromegaly (a condition that is normally caused by a pituitary disorder), and a means of curing it. He plans to become rich by infecting people and then charging what he wishes for the cure. His first target is a concert pianist, with the aim of forcing the man's daughter to marry him.
• Naked Lunch: Doctor Benway, a random general practitioner that Lee visited once in New York, turns out to be the Diabolical Mastermind behind an international drug ring operating out of Interzone. This incredulity is one of the many reasons why Lee might be insane.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master: When Dan is taken to the hospital after the car crash and is put under for emergency surgery, Freddy appears as a homicidal doctor who wants to perform some experiments.
• Pathology: All of the doctors involved in the murder game display gross indifference to the sanctity of human life, but, by the end, the leader Dr. Jake Gallo has gone completely psychotic.
• Predators: When the characters organize themselves, one character asks why those who put them on the planet to hunt got a merc, an Israeli soldier, Spetznaz, a prisoner inside for multiple rapes, a Yakuza, a rebel, etc. and put a doctor with them? Answer: he's a poison-obsessed killer.
• In Scream and Scream Again, Dr. Browning is using transplant surgery to create a race of perfect humans.
• The persona of Dr. Ripper, the most popular of the slashers on the Slashers game show.
• Star Wars: This is what Cornelius Evazan's (the "I don't like you either" guy who threatens Luke in the bar on Tatooine in A New Hope) famous twelve death sentences came from. The Decraniated — background extras from Rogue One and Solo distinguished by missing the top halves of their heads and said halves being replaced with droid brains — are his work.
• Stonehearst Asylum: Lamb. While his methods towards mental health are humane in and of themselves, he keeps the real staff locked up, puts a homicidal killer like Finn in charge of security, and shows no remorse when Finn kills two escaped staff members and later one of the patients, electroshocks Salt into amnesia and tortures Newgate.
• A View to a Kill: Herr Doktor Carl Mortner is a Mengele-esque eugenicist who conducted a Super Breeding Program in an effort to create the "ideal" soldier for the Nazis. While most experiments failed, the few Designer Babies that survived became highly intelligent — but also mentally unstable due to the Psycho Serums used. Max Zorin is one of the more horrific examples.

Literature

• More of a Mad Research Psychiatrist than anything, but Lydia from The Chronicles of Professor Jack Baling would technically count as one of these.
• The Igors from Discworld are a whole race of mad doctors. Of course, most of the time, they use their "madness" to merely assist their masters, be they vampires or the Watch.
• Shingen Kishitani in Durarara!!. Contrary to most other examples, he's not really evil — just crazy.
• Geronimo Stilton: In "The Temple of the Ruby of Fire", Geronimo encounters Dr. Wacky Whiskers a couple of times, to his horror. While a more benign version of this trope, his personal philosophy is "When in doubt, I give an injection. Everything gets better with an injection."
• Two from Gog:
  • Doctor Horald Olafsen from the Disease as cure chapter believes that healthy people live less and that being free of ill is "a hidden harm", so logically everyone must be perpetually sick, and that people should receive diseases from doctors in order to have an average level of well-being. Gog notices that he was probably the only person to ever bother hearing the doctor's ideas.
  • Doctor Anosh-Uthra from Moral surgery claims he can rid people of sins or unwanted virtues. When Gog asks if his entire soul can be amputated, the doctor says that he could try it.
• In Guns of the Dawn, an enemy army is under the command of the notorious "Dr. Lam", said to be a physician who rose to power in the chaos of revolution and who now enjoys dissecting captured prisoners. When Emily gets captured, she's taken to see him. It turns out that not only is Dr. Nathanial Lammegeier not a medical doctor (he's an engineer), he's also one of the nicest characters in the book. This isn't the biggest falsehood believed about the Denlanders and their "bloodthirsty revolution", either.
• Played straight and subverted in the Halo novels with Doctor Catherine Halsey. Played straight in that she is repeatedly compared to Josef Mengele in Karen Traviss's Kilo-Five trilogy due to Halsey's role in the SPARTAN-II program. The subversion is the fact that all other Halo media, including all the novels released before Kilo-Five, depict Halsey as being nothing like a mad doctor.
• Dr. Herbert West from Herbert West–Reanimator. Mad doctor tries to reanimate dead tissue in order to defeat death, a noble ideal, although his fervor and methods (including body-snatching and using people who have just died, often directly or indirectly due to him) in order to get the 'freshest specimens' tip him safely over the edge into crazy.
• Dr. Moreau of The Island of Doctor Moreau, who performed horrific surgeries on animals in an attempt to make them more human.
• Dr. Eric Logue in the Joe Pickett novel 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. Escaping, he travels the country posing as a ufologist; attacking and dissecting people while they are still alive and believing that he is acting under the orders of aliens.
• The Last Days of New Paris features the original, Josef Mengele, who is conducting horrific experiments on the magical art-based life-forms known as "manifs".
• The Thinking Machine Erasmus in Legends of Dune who performs deadly experiments on countless human slaves out of sheer curiosity, he can be best described as robo-Mengele.
• Plastic surgeon Dr. Charles Smith from Let Me Call You Sweetheart really isn't right in the head. He's obsessed with his dead daughter to the point of recreating her likeness in other women and is revealed to have performed surgery on her himself, which is rather unethical. He views Barbara Tompkins as his creation and feels he's entitled to her company, and felt much the same about Suzanne. He gets almost violently angry with Kerry when she questions him, to the point she genuinely fears for her safety, and then intends to kill himself near the end of the story due to no longer being able to operate. Overall, he is just not a well man.
• Colonel Titus Hyde from the Matthew Hawkwood novel Resurrectionist. Literally mad, as the novel starts with him escaping from Bethlem Hospital (the original Bedlam) by killing a visiting clergyman, cutting off his face, and wearing it as a mask.
• Doctor Benway from Naked Lunch fits this to the letter. Actually, all of the doctors in Naked Lunch are pretty much like this.
• Doctor Quatt from the Nursery Crime novel The Big Over Easy.
• In President's Vampire, both Zach and Helen consider Johann Konrad to be this, although he himself believes he's perfectly sane and reasonable. He apparently believes that there's nothing strange in creating undead monsters, engineering Squicky, killer viruses, working with the Nazis on Frankenstein Monsters or using Human Resources in skin cosmetics.
  Zach: This guy's more full of shit than a duck pond.
• Maester Qyburn from A Song of Ice and Fire was this. Until he was stripped of his maester status for performing vivisections, which was an ethical breach too far for the Citadel. He ended up working with the most foul and depraved mercenary company in both Westeros and beyond as their company definitely-not-a-maester-anymore, officially-demoted-to-quack surgeon. And, given the world includes companies led by people such as Gregor Clegane, "the Bloody Mummers" status as "sellswords everybody hates" is truly impressive. Qyburn fitted himself right in and kept up the "good" work on the company's victims. By-the-by... he's actually really, really good at keeping patients alive through horrifically awful injuries or amputations; better than most of the maesters who have specialised in healing, in fact. Plenty of unethical, hands-on practice makes one a terrific surgeon, apparently. As of A Feast for Crows, Qyburn has moved on to being the main... interrogator... for Queen Cersei.
• Nye from Skulduggery Pleasant definitely counts.
• Tales of the Bounty Hunters: Imperial surgeons cut out most of Dengar's hypothalamus, removing all his emotions but anger, hope, and loneliness to make him into a perfect assassin. Other material establishes that physicians in the Star Wars universe also have the "first, do no harm" rule like the real-world Hippocratic Oath, which of course the Empire doesn't care about. They also perform this en masse on the pacifist Aruzans to "Redesign" them as violent killers.
• Vic and Frank: Necromancers: Frank, who is both a surgeon and a serial killer.
• Whateley Universe:
  • Several Mad Scientists are medical doctors, or at least claim to be. Notable examples include Dr. DNA (creator of the Ani-Men), Dr. Venus (who is a Professor Guinea Pig in addition to her experiments on her 'studmuffins'), Dr. Veritas (who was Dr. Venus's mentor, and did the cybernetic implants for the 'Cyber-Tribe') and Dr. Gladys Wilkins (who runs a 'black' clinic for the supervillain community in New York City).
  • Jobe Wilkins is notable in that he has the skills and knowledge of a full medical doctor as of 2006, just not the degree — he's still in high school. Given her ambitions and vanity, she probably has attended medical school by the time of the 2016 stories, or at the very least found some institution willing to grant the title.
• The Wheel of Time: Nemene Damendar Boann was a very famous and successful doctor in the Age of Legends... but she was also secretly a sadist, who deliberately inflicted excruciating pain on her patients for no other reason than her personal pleasure. The authorities finally discovered her evil, and she fled and joined the Dark One to avoid retaliation. She became the Forsaken Semirhage and still enjoys torturing people; she is said to have once driven an entire city insane by magical torture.
• When the Angels Left the Old Country: The demonic doctor at Ellis Island is revealed to be a Serial Killer, especially of other demons.

Live-Action TV

• "Dr." Leo Spaceman (pronounced Spa-CHEM-in by everyone except Tracy Jordan) from 30 Rock is not evil, but definitely mad.
• Arrested Development has Dr. Frank Stein: anybody who decides to switch a man's middle and index finger during surgery can not be all right in the head.
• Babylon 5: The Dilgar war criminal "Deathwalker" (Warmaster Jha'dur) from the eponymous episode conducted cruel medical experiments and tested plagues on entire conquered populations during the Dilgar War a couple decades prior to the period of the show.
• Community: In "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps", Troy's scary story has him and Abed stumbling on mad doctor Pierce's lab. He slips them a mickey and sews them together like conjoined twins...but they find this gives them a psychic bond, and they knock him out with a telekinetically hurled skillet. They then operate on him, sewing his butt-cheeks onto his chest. He laughs that he can now feel himself up — until he finds that they've also switched his hands with his feet!
• CSI:
  • It may be a stretch, but "Justice is Served" has a mad nutritionist. She has a bad case of porphyria and thinks that the best way to stave off its symptoms is to feast on the most blood-rich organs of healthy men.
  • The mad white supremacist eugenicist who killed Lady Heather's daughter in "Pirates of the Third Reich".
• Namtar from the Farscape episode "DNA Mad Scientist" performs cruel mutation experiments on sapient subjects in order to figure out how well it'd work if he gave those traits to himself. When Crichton outright compares him to Josef Mengele, Namtar remarks that Mengele sounds like a visionary to him.
• Firefly's Dr. Matthias, head of the Academy responsible for the experiments that drove River insane. He is killed by the Operative near the beginning of Serenity. It is odd that both the most repulsive villain and the most noble hero of the series are doctors.
• Game of Thrones: Qyburn was stripped of his maester's chain for experimenting on living men.
• Get Smart:
  • Parodied with Jarvis Pym, the self-styled 'Mad Pharmacist'. Pym was, appropriately enough, played by Vincent Price.
  • Dr. Zharko in "Shock It To Me", who is literally Laughing Mad.
    99: You're mad!
    Dr. Zharko: Mad, am I? MAAAD, AM I?! MWAHAHAHAAA!
    99: [anxiously] Don't do that!
    Dr. Zharko: [utterly straight-faced] Don't do what?
  • In "Where-What-How-Who Am I?", there's a Dr. Mengele who tries to kill Max with a lethal injection. However, he tells his nurse to sterilize the needle first. "I may be working for KAOS, but I'm still a doctor!"
• In one episode of Highlander, Duncan is kidnapped and drugged by a doctor who wants to conduct experiments on him, having seen Duncan's immortal Healing Factor kick in after being hit by a car. It's revealed that Duncan isn't the doctor's first victim, either — the guy killed a nurse who caught on, and Duncan has to find evidence to prove his innocence, as the doctor used Duncan's T-bird when he killed the nurse.
• House: Dr. Gregory House himself is really just a Dr. Jerk. However, at one point he had two dozen or so candidates who were competing for a coveted position on his diagnostic team. When it seems that one of their patients has polio, which is mostly a third world disease, it turns out that one of the doctors was deliberately poisoning the patient to mimic the symptoms of polio in order to, as he put it, "raise awareness". After House disqualifies him, he tells Foreman to call the cops.
• Intergalactic: Dr. Hague Blake reveals himself to be one after realizing that Grieves does not age. He tries to harvest eggs from her forcibly for an Immortality Inducer so that his pets will never die before being killed by Tula.
• Kamen Rider Drive has a Shift Car literally called Mad Doctor, which emits horrific pain onto people, but heals them right as rain in the process. On the villains side, we have Medic, who mutates her Roidmude allies when the war against the Riders intensifies.
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent
  • A doctor in the episode "See Me" is attempting to cure his patients' schizophrenia by altering their corneas, under the assumption that their hallucinations are actually caused by their eyes rather than their brains. However, all it does is make them blind.
  • Another in "D.A.W." is a former drug addict who now uses morphine to OD his patients, pilfers valuables from them, and gets them to agree to cremations so that their real cause of death can't be traced.
• At the end of the Masters of Horror episode "Pick Me Up", the ambulance crew are revealed to be a pair of serial killers unrelated to the main two in the episode who drive around looking for wounded people whom they can take as prey.
• Mouse (2021): Seo-joon is a brain surgeon who's also a serial killer and experimenting on his victim's brains. Seo-joon's colleague, Daniel Lee, follows in his footsteps and encourages Ba-reum to kill people.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "The Deprogrammers", Professor Trent Davis is told by his Torkor master Megwan that he may continue his experiments on his fellow humans after he successfully deprogrammed Evan Cooper. As he thought that he was working for the resistance group the Vindicators, Evan had killed Megwan's rival Koltok.
• The Freak of the Week in the Smallville episode "Cure" is immortal and operates on his wife in an attempt to make her immortal, too.
• Starsky & Hutch: Dr. Matwick from "Murder Ward" invents a drug that inhibits a patient's behavior more and more as the patient becomes violent. He tests it on mental patients, four of whom die of respiratory failure.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dr. Elias Giger, the Bajoran scientist from the episode "In the Cards", is certainly eccentric, believing that cells die because they "get bored" and devises a machine to "excite" them. Unusually, although he is probably nuts, he doesn't turn evil.
• Star Trek: Enterprise:
  • The Mirror Universe version of Phlox from the episode "In a Mirror, Darkly" enjoys performing brutal and sadistic medical experiments.
  • He also gets dangerously close in the prime universe in "Singularity" when radiation makes the entire crew turn obsessive-compulsive. He nearly dissects Mayweather's brain because of a simple headache.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: Dr. Tristan Adams from the episode "Dagger of the Mind", who went a little too happy with his machine for rehabilitating mental patients.
• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • In "Darkling", the Doctor alters his programming in an attempt to become smarter, but adding personality traits from others creates an Enemy Within from their collective dark side. Or whenever someone deactivates his "Ethical Subroutines", which seems to happen quite easily given that it doesn't appear to take much skill to turn them off.
  • In "Coda", Janeway merely imagines the EMH to be like this during a hallucination when she awakens in sick bay after a shuttle crash. The doctor coldly informs her that she has a fatal illness and refuses to let her see anyone else, then erects a forcefield to perform involuntary euthanasia on Janeway.
  • "Living Witness" has a propagandistic holoprogram portraying the crew as evil people aiding the race that conquered them hundreds of years before. The Doctor is shown injecting a prisoner with a substance that destroys his brain.
  • Dr. Crell Moset from "Nothing Human" is a Cardassian doctor who is clearly based on Josef Mengele. The crew of Voyager create a holographic replica of him to help remove an alien parasite from B'Elanna, and she refuses treatment when she learns who they replicated. There's also a Bajoran crew member who objects to the hologram because his grandfather was killed by the real doctor's experiments during the Occupation.
• The immortal, organ-stealing doctor from the Supernatural episode "Time is on My Side".
• Tales from the Crypt: In "The Switch", Carlton visits a mad doctor who performs a face, then a torso, and finally a lower body transplant on him. This being Tales from the Crypt, things do not end the way he had hoped.
• The X-Files has its share of crazy doctors engaged in cloning and hybrid experiments on humans. Special off-Myth Arc mention to the episode "Sanguinarium", which introduces the worst kind of mad doctors: Satanist mad doctors.

Music

• Aborted use this as their central theme, explicitly or implicitly inhabiting most of their album art and music videos.
• Australian industrial duo Angelspit has general Mad Doctor appeal, with medical motifs such as pills and syringes appearing all over their merch, albums, et cetera. Their first studio album Krankhaus used the trope not only visually but musically. The band created a secret page explaining the backstory of the album, which can be found here.
• Ever since Carcass introduced medical terminology and an obsession with pathology to death metal, mad surgeons and morticians has been a staple of extreme metal's lyrical and aesthetic themes.
• "The Doctor's Wife" by Clockwork Quartet has shades of this- given that the song is about his Sanity Slippage as he tries to save his wife.
• "Dr. Piranha" by Dog Fashion Disco. Dr. Piranha rose from a toilet bearing gifts, killed a patient in the operating room, was angered when the "mercitron" killed a patient, and then went into orbit to search for a baboon's heart.
• "Dr. Sin Is In" by Lordi, from the album Deadache, is about an evil doctor that does awful things to the singer. Given the singer in this case is a demon, that's one scary doctor.
  The doctor is in... God help us!
• Midwives of Ruin and their first album Malpractice. Let's just say that medical motifs are popular in industrial music.
• The Nox Arcana album Blackthorn Asylum has Dr. Neville Aldritch, the owner of the titular Bedlam House. He gleefully mutilates the patients of the asylum to fulfill his medical curiosity.
• Spawn of Possession has the song "Servitude of Souls", which has said mad doctor kidnap and torture others to infuse their souls to his own.

Roleplay

• Dietrich "Medic" Luzwheit in Dino Attack RPG is an unstable doctor with... questionable ethics and even more questionable methods which include, among other things, removing numerous bones from a living patient. Fortunately his colleagues are all far more sensible and level-headed.

Tabletop Games

• Chronicles of Darkness and the fan-game Genius: The Transgression:
  • If you suffer a crash in the Midnight Roads, you may attract a gremlin. Driven by a mad desire to fix anything — or anyone — that's "broken", it'll set itself down beside you and take those long drills and scalpels it has in place of fingers and it'll start to work. It'll cut and bore and stitch and weld and otherwise do its best to piece you together with whatever it has to hand — if you're lucky, it'll just chop up any of your fellow passengers. More likely, it'll use the bits of the car or bike you crashed to do the work. If you end up living through their removing your ribs and replacing them with a chassis of solid metal, and grafting parts from an old clock to your heart to keep it beating, then they'll pull out your guts and put in a diesel processor before replacing the flesh of your trunk with plastic and rubber. But if you live through all that... relax! When the gremlin vanishes back into the Shadow, it'll take the magic keeping you alive with it, and you'll die more or less instantly. They also like to do things like trying to build a car from the carcasses of dead cattle and babies from scrap metal, just to see if they can make them "work".
  • This is also where many Geniuses and demiurges end up. In the first case, the Progenitors have just recovered from a fairly brutal and messy purge of the unmada and Illuminated in their ranks, and there's still a considerable chance for any given Genius to go screaming off the deep end and end up insane rather than just crazy. In the second, the only way for a demiurge to catalyze the creation of a new Promethean lineage is obsession, and most have a healthy dose of desperation and insanity to go with it, neatly explaining why they spent so much time and effort trying to reanimate the dead.
• Dungeons & Dragons has one or two in settings involving Mad Science:
  • Dr. Victor Mordenheim and Dr. Daclaud Heinfroth in Ravenloft. The former focuses on medical science of the Frankenstein nature, while the latter is a mad psychiatrist (also a vampire that feeds on cerebrospinal fluid). There's also a minor Darklord, Frantisek Markov, who is a cheap rip-off of the titular character from The Island of Doctor Moreau; mutilating animals and humans to create "broken men", which are horrific humanoid animals. He's mostly self-titled, however; he's a former butcher and pig farmer who developed a sick fascination with surgery.
  • Spelljammer has the whole race of these, Xixchil. They do —for a price— any surgery feat imaginable, like "improvements" adding strength, "natural" armor, wings, sex changing, and so on. Xixchil just can't grasp their clients' (and players') assumptions and use their very non-humanoid common sense, working as close to the request as they imagine. Body Horror ensues in all and any cases more ambiguous than medical or minor plastic surgery.
• Exalted: One coined word: necrosurgeons. They will patch you up no matter how badly messed up you are. Literally. With dead flesh and bones. Keep in mind that if more than 50% of your body is made up of dead matters, you'll be counted as an undead.
• House Astyanath, a faction in Infernum, are a House notorious for their almost religious fascination with pain, and are implied to have quite a few of these in their ranks. More explicit are Dissectionists — Mad Doctors as entertainers! For the delight and amusement of other demons, these depraved surgeons publically "peel" living creatures, using blades and alchemical concoctions to neatly remove skin from flesh, peel flesh from bone, and extract organs, all of which are arranged onto steel frameworks as part of the "show". The circulatory system and other such things must be kept intact during the "performance", so the end result is a grotesque flower of flesh and viscera... which is still alive, aware, and in incomprehensible agony.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Goblin Chirurgeon is a prime example.
  • Basically the default Blue-aligned antagonist, like the Simic Combine or Jin-Gitaxias.
• Malifaux: Dr. McMourning, the Guild's coroner and FME, is really a resurrectionist in his spare time, building and animating various kinds of zombie and Flesh Golem.
• Doctor Oscar Schneiderbunk, a character frequently quoted in the sidebars of Leading Edge Games' rulebooks such as Phoenix Command and Living Steel. He was made available as an NPC in the Living Steel adventure supplement KVISR Rocks, though if you find it necessary to go to him for treatment you might be better off eating a bullet. Examples of his unique bedside manner include "Yes, you have lost a lot of blood, but with all the pieces you're missing, you shouldn't need as much." "Nurse, hand me my mallet. The swelling will stop the bleeding." "Nurse, hand me my mallet. I must tenderize the area before making the first incision." "In my career as a doctor I've learned to live with death, and now, Private, so will you. Except the living part." "Hand me my grenade. Pre-Op is getting crowded".
• In Rocket Age's Lab 8 in the Nazi's research base on Mercury this is practically a job requirement. Vivisection, cybernetics, and genetic tampering are common, despite often being pointlessly lethal.
• Vampire: The Masquerade has a number of examples, but one of the standouts is Dr. Netchurch of Clan Malkavian. Netchurch denies that there is anything wrong with him, despite the assumptions of his clan (every Malkavian has or acquires some form of mental disorder), and believes there is a rational explanation for the "magical" powers associated with vampirism, one that can be found through his detailed experiments on willing volunteers. Of course, Dr. Netchurch's problem is that he slips into fugue states, and doesn't realize that he's using his powers of Dominate to compel his test subjects to volunteer for painful, invasive procedures...
• Warhammer 40,000 has more than its fair share of Mad Doctors:
  • The Orks' "Mad Doks" or "Painboyz" are nothing but these. These Orks have basic medical knowledge hard-wired into their DNA, along with a compulsion to "tinker." They've been known to decapitate an Ork, and graft its head onto another Ork's body just to see what happens. Or swap two Orks' limbs, just for fun. Or replace an Orks' brain with a live squig, for the hell of it. Or give an Ork bionic lungs, when he came in with a toothache. Or just plain forget what they were supposed to be doing, pick a limb at random and bolt on a replacement. You have to be really desperate to visit a Mad Dok, so some don't bother waiting for you to show up. This is probably best displayed in the spinoff Gorkamorka, which has six pages of tables dedicated to the Dok's surgery because it's that unpredictable. Some interpretations even indicate that the Orks in a mob led by a Dok have Feel No Pain not because of the Dok providing medical help, but because the Orks are so afraid of him doing so that they pretend not to have suffered any injury less severe than decapitation while chanting phrases like "Missin' leg? No, dat'z just a skratch, 'onest."
  • The most infamous of these would be Mad Dok Grotsnik, whose work included hiding explosives in the heads of his patients and detonating them when he felt like it. The other Orks' revenge and Grotsnik's subsequent "resurrection" at the hands of his Grot assistants have left him a patchwork of greenskin and cyborg bits, and even loonier. Grotsnik occasionally amputates his own limbs "just to keep his hand in" and is rumored to be collecting parts from his patients to build a super-Ork. He is only alive because he is the unofficial court physician of the Ork warlord and prophet Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, whose "vishuns from da Gods" started right after Grotsnik gave him his adamantium skull (sans explosives).
  • The setting's Dark Eldar have Haemonculi, who have great knowledge of physiology and medicine but use it for decidedly sadistic purposes. They share the Mad Doks' desire to "experiment," but have more tools and practical understanding of medicine at their disposal, so unfortunately their "patients" can live through more. They are often responsible for the lumbering, misshapen Grotesques that sometimes accompany Dark Eldar raiders as literal meat shields due to their inability to feel pain, while one story describes a Haemonculus who had a victim reduced to a collection of skin and organs hanging from hooks on his lab's ceiling. The victim was still alive.
  • Fabius Bile, a Chaos Lord whom we are contractually obligated to remind you has a lab coat made of human skin, has transformed the population of entire planets in shambling monstrosities in genocidal experiments. He's so crazy he's spent thousands of years in the Warp and come out of it mostly unchanged. He created a master race that are the Space Marine Super Soldiers but stronger and crazier, while his failed experiments tend to disintegrate from the violence of their mutations. In the Horus Heresy novel Angel Exterminatus, even the Iron Warriors — embittered siege-focused killing machines who committed genocide on their own homeworld and are often chomping at the bit for the chance to wipe out their rivals among their own ranks — are appalled by what Fabius Bile does to captured Space Marines.
  • The World Eaters have specialized people who can perform a delicate surgery where they partially lobotomize the patient, removing the parts of the brain that let them feel fear, allowing for scarily murderous warriors. These are called berserker-surgeons.
• Warhammer has Festus the Leechlord, also known as the Dark Apothecary. He used to be a doctor who would try to cure plagues but was eventually driven mad by Nurgle and started to spread plagues instead of curing them.
• War Machine has the Cryx necrosurgeons, who make Flesh Golem cyborgs and the Cephalyx, who make slave cyborgs of the living and can take over and destroy minds.

Theme Parks

• The Caretaker (a.k.a. Albert Caine) from Universal's Halloween Horror Nights is a former surgeon that now likes to horrifically dissect people alive, as a way of further studying how the human mind and body reacts to pain and eventual death.
• Busch Gardens' Howl-O-Scream has made several haunted house attractions based around Dr. Edgar Von Angst — an evil surgeon that takes his victims apart and then rearranges them in gruesome ways.

Video Games

• Sugita Genpaku from Akanesasu Sekai de Kimi to Utau combines this with Mad Scientist. He is so obsessed with performing surgery and studying the human body that he will jump at the chance to dissect someone, even if their condition isn't that serious to begin with.
• Doctor Alexander Nox a.k.a. Caustic from Apex Legends became obsessed with toxic gases and eradication of living beings. He was once an employee of a pest control corporation, where he weaponized his noxious artillery and found his greatest intrigue in torturing humans. He's definitely not a nice guy, but even his evil has limits.
• Assassin's Creed: The Templars seem to have someone filling this role in every game.
  • Assassin's Creed: Garnier de Naplouse has his men round up the indigent and insane so he performs surgical experiments on them, hoping to cure their insanity by making them braindead slaves... and he thinks he's helping them.
  • Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood: Malfatto is basically a Renaissance-era Jack the Ripper dressed in a beaky plague doctor mask. A Templar (read: on Malfatto's side) privately notes how disturbing he is and doubts that he's even a real doctor.
  • Assassin's Creed: Unity: le Roi des Thunes takes a cut from all the beggars in Paris; if they don't make their quotas, he has his surgeons cut off a limb since crippled beggars bring in more dough.
  • Assassin's Creed Syndicate: John Elliotson floods the streets of London with a datura-based drug that rapidly erodes their conscious mind, leaving them drooling idiots. He's introduced in an operating theater dissecting a corpse; he ruins the brain and then gives a slightly embarrassed "whoops" before calling his assistant for another.
• Beatrix from Battleborn is a Jennerit medical doctor obsessed with experimenting on living things, whether they be others such as her fellow Battleborn, or her very own self.
• Dr. Malus Thorm from Baldur's Gate III is a Shar worshipper who's been warped by the shadow curse, turning him into an insane, undead monster. He performs grotesque surgeries on unlucky "patients", allowing his nurses to murder them under the belief that the absence of life is the only way to "cure" them.
• Dr. Steinman from BioShock, a plastic surgeon who doesn't know where to draw the line between surgery and "art". He scrawls "Beauty is a moral imperative" and "Above all, do no harm" around the level with the blood of his patients. That should tell you all you need to know about him.
• Borderlands has Dr. Ned, who immediately shows you his... work. He might be on your side, but he's still very definitely this trope.
• Yuna from Breath of Fire IV wants to turn people into gods. One of them is Nina's sister and Crey's betrothed, and you Mercy Kill her.
• Edward Richtofen from Call of Duty: Zombies.
  "I'll fill my pockets with their livers!"
• The Doctor, Big Bad of Cave Story, and his Mengele-style experiments using the game's Psycho Serum.
• Chzo Mythos: William Taylor is revealed to be a mad doctor who has created a murderous Frankenstein Monster from his dead fellow crewmates.
• City of Heroes's Doctor Vahzilok.
• In Darkest Dungeon, the Plague Doctor class shows hints of this in her normal dialogue, but she keeps it under control and mostly focused on experimenting with toxic weapons on her enemies (or testing enhancing drugs on your party). However, she fully slides into this if she fails a Resolve check, turning into an insane, raving lunatic who hurts her allies, berates them for their failures, or gibbering incoherently.
• Doctor Challus Mercer of Dead Space. Religious whackjob. Conducts experiments on unwilling subjects to make a even deadlier Necromorph. Proactively tries to kill Isaac by shutting down life support and releasing his Hunter. Crosses the Moral Event Horizon fairly early on and just gets worse from there.
• Doc Morbid in Fallout is a shady Back-Alley Doctor operating in Junktown. If the player breaks into his basement, it's revealed that he sells human flesh to Iguana Bob in The Hub as The Secret of Long Pork Pies. He'll confront the player upon their return, and if they beg for their life, he'll settle on taking one of their eyes (granting a permanent Perception debuff).
• Dr. Earnhardt from Far Cry 3 is completely nuts and frequently tests his homemade pills on himself, but is a skilled physician and chemist in spite of being constantly high as a kite, and pretty much the most upstanding character in the game.
• Dr. Baldhead from Guilty Gear was once a successful doctor who went mad when he couldn't save a patient and became a serial killer. Eventually he recovered (slightly) and took up a new identity as Faust, atoning for his actions by curing people.
• Dr. Randolph and almost every other member of the hospital staff from The Heilwald Loophole. Whatever happened there, they were all driven mad and began perverting treatments into something inhuman. The only people who avert this trope are the trash collector and Nurse Helene.
• Jerry in The Last of Us was a Well-Intentioned Extremist who sought to experiment on Ellie to create a cure for the Parasite Zombies. However, it's shown that him and the other doctors are a bunch of quacks who don't know what they're doing, as their first instinct is to remove her entire brain. Furthermore, audio logs are found revealing that Ellie wasn't the first of The Immune they tried this on.
• League of Legends invokes this trope with Dr. Mundo, a brutish Dumb Muscle with an insane pain tolerance who merely thinks he's a doctor. He was raised by abusive asylum doctors that regularly performed torturous experiments on him, but not only was he immune to them, he took it as a genuine inspiration to take up medicine on his own. Unfortunately, his only real knowledge of "being a doctor" is butchering people to shreds, not that it seems to bother him too much.
• Sojiro from Lost Dimension, a doctor with Healing Hands, has a rather unsettling belief in the absolute perfection of medicinem to the point that whenever he had a patient he could not cure, he'd murder them so their cause of death would be murder rather than his inability to cure their illness.
• In Mad Father, the main character's father (whose profession is a doctor) has been taking in and experimenting on local homeless people to turn them into dolls. In the good ending, the main character eventually ends up following in her father's footsteps.
• Doctor Fred Edison from Maniac Mansion has no compunction about kidnapping the protagonist's girlfriend to test out his new zombification machine, but as it turns out he's actually a decent enough guy who's really under the control of the Big Bad meteor that enslaved him over twenty years ago. In the sequel, Day of the Tentacle, Laverne isn't quite a doctor yet, but as a med-student, she's on her way there — and she's certainly quite... unhinged.
• Dr. Saleon, a.k.a. 'Dr. Heart', from Mass Effect.
• Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA-: Yakushi Nyorai usually isn't this trope, but he has a hidden unstable side that can be triggered seemingly at random, in which he becomes a grinning and cackling nutjob who howls that he'll "heal" enemies and "cure them to the root", among other things.
• The Oddworld series' Vykkers have this as their Racial Hat.
• One of the more scary enemies in the main game (i.e. non-Whistleblower) Outlast is Richard Trager, who fits this trope to a T. He's especially terrifying in that, unlike every other enemy in the game (other than the Groom in Whistleblower) he can open doors.
• "Dr. Mad" is a minor villain and a boss in the first Phantasy Star game.
• Psychonauts has Doctor Loboto, who fancies himself qualified to deal with psychiatric issues despite not... quite having the appropriate qualifications.
  Dogen: What do you think's wrong with my brain, Doctor?
  Loboto: How should I know? I'm a dentist. But here's what I do know: when a tooth is bad, you pull it out!
• Dr. Cutter's superstar persona in Rumble Roses XX.
• Marian, a witch-doctor wannabe, from Rune Factory 3 will like you to be her patient and will force you to take a shot of her random medicine. 80% of her love events involve her putting you into a medical experiment or making you drag someone to her clinic. Everyone in the town's scared of her.
• Although probably not comparable to some of the others on this page, Shiro Miyata of Siren 1 is far from sane. Before the game has even started he Murders a pregnant nurse he was involved with and then buries her in the woods. He later dissects her zombified corpse (fetus and all), along with that of her twin sister (who he also murdered).
  • He also murders his own twin brother and assumes his identity, even though by the time he does this, there is no one around for him to interact with, making the murder and the masquerade especially pointless.
• The Suffering's Dr. Killjoy has his patients' best interests at heart and genuinely wants to cure them, but his patients have a poor survival rate due to his rather... questionable methods.
  • And that "poor" patient survival rating of his? Means that, barring Torque, they're all dead.
• In Super Smash Bros. Melee and the fourth game, Dr. Mario has a Palette Swap that invokes this. He dons a black lab coat, black gloves, and black shoes. The Japanese Melee website even described this costume as an "unlicensed doctor".
• Túsū Wine from The Tale of Food is a talented doctor who studied under Huà Tuó, but is incredibly eccentric and jerkish, and often deliberately antagonizes other people even when his intentions are good. People call him "Doctor Strange" for this reason.
• The Marquis de Singe from Tales of Monkey Island.
• Team Fortress 2's Medic: The healing properties of the Medigun were an accidental side-effect of whatever his experiments were supposed to be for, possibly related to the time he made a man's skeleton disappear.
  • Meet The Medic pretty much sums him up. Apparently, progress sounds like an exploding heart.
  • Aside from extracting a man's skeleton, he has put a (live) human brain inside of a pumpkin, sewed baboon uteruses into people (including three different ones INTO THE SAME GUY), had said uteruses produce live baboon offspring, and surgically added the souls of others to himself to escape the deal he made with Satan. So yeah, the man is insane.
• Eirin Yagokoro of Touhou Project is often seen as this. She made a "fish bait" that caused fish to mutate into monsters and the bamboo fertilizer that made bamboo grow super fast and super strong in ''The Inaba of the Moon And The Inaba of the Earth," and also a nightmare pill. Fanon has her subjecting Reisen and others to medical experiments.
• Vampire: the Masquerade- Bloodlines has Alistair Grout, psychologist and Malkavian Primogen. Only, he's from the old, old school of psychiatry, and thinks Freud was a pussy. Oh, and he's a Malkavian, a member of the clan of vampires who all go insane after the Embrace if they weren't before. All this combines to a manor full of Malevolent Architecture, escaped violent mental patients that he used for his own experiments, and his darling wife under glass.
• Vampyr (2018): It's revealed that Jonathan's best friend Dr. Swansea is responsible for causing the Skal epidemic in London when he attempted to treat the Spanish influenza by injecting sick patients with vampire blood.
• Dr. Schabbs in Wolfenstein 3-D.

Visual Novels

• The Arcana: Quaestor Valdemar is the head doctor of the palace, and during the Red Plague, they conducted horrific experiments on plague victims. They want the plague to return because it gave them so many test subjects. The only thing they love more than dissecting dead bodies is dissecting living ones.
• Shuu from Hatoful Boyfriend.
• Miyo Takano from Higurashi: When They Cry.
  • Irie too. Though he was persuaded by Miyo and didn't really wish to dissect and vivisect people.
• In Tsukihime, Kohaku has great medicinal knowledge and a pharmacology license despite her role as a Meido, which she occasionally uses for rather worrisome ends. In the pseudo-sequel, one possible way to end the day is to end up trapped in the basement jail with Kohaku about to inject Shiki with many syringes. This carries over into Fanon and the fighting game adaptation Melty Blood.
• Before Yakumo from Spirit Hunter: NG was a children's author, he was working to become a surgeon. The Screaming Author is made when he puts his medical skills to use by dissecting the limbs of a young girl, keeping her alive while he mutates her to resemble a bird-like monstrosity.

Webcomics

• Ansem Retort's Zexion not only implants explosives in people's organs but also fused a man's DNA with a cookie just to see what would happen.
• Subverted a tad bit in Awful Hospital, while the deranged staff of the Hospital clearly looks the part, with no two alike and most of them sentient body parts or surgically/medically symbolic things, they're not quite as bad or crazed as they seem to be; they're just doing their job.
• Dr. Kurtis from Beyond the Canopy. An animate skeleton who keeps his surgical implements in a crack in his skull, his first appearance is describing the augmentation surgery he's about to perform to his (fully conscious) patient, who complains "I'm only here for a chipped tooth. Is this really necessary?" Kurtis' reply? "Yes."
• In Cuanta Vida, the Blue Doctor is insane and many of his teammates don't want to get treatment from him or people will fetch his patients after the procedure to keep the doctor from performing "extra tests".
• Dr. Ink from Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures has been described, at times, as an "egotistical, calculating, raving lunatic."
  • He's even worse in his cameo in The Foxfire Chronicles. Not to mention how his creator usually portrays him.
• Dr. Germahn in El Goonish Shive is a subversion, as a self-described Chaotic Good mad scientist. Given that all his experiments tend to be biological in nature, usually sodas that cause the drinker to transform in some way, he seems to count.
• Lampshaded in Freefall. Florence is stuck in the middle of a hurricane with a life-threatening cut on her leg, and muses that with her luck, the only medical center she'd be able to find would be run by a mad doctor. She then notes that, as an uplifted wolf, what she really needs is someone experienced in canine physiology. Cue a "mad veterinarian" sign. ^ExplanationHis name is Winston Thurmad which was on the sign before it was damaged.
• Ruby Quest has Filbert, a doctor who conducted unethical experiments on his patients and ended up inflicting them with The Corruption. He is now convinced that he has to "cut the bad out of them," whether they're willing or not. He has also infected himself; searching his office reveals a drawer full of bloody fleshy bits that he's cut off from himself and a note that says "Never doubt that you are pure."
• Schlock Mercenary had Dr. Pau on Heaven Hive with his highly experimental nanomachines and a little mafia enforcing the monopoly. He caused any harm at all only because he didn't fully know what he's doing but was quite willing to go on.
• In Sparklecare, Dr. Doom is this. After all, he's a multi-limbed rat thing with rainbow ears that's also a doctor who's absolutely zany... need we say more?
• Tower of God: Michael the Missionary, Khun's team doctor. He continued to poison Gyetang even after he died, insisting it was medicine even after his cover had been blown.
• Unsounded: Bastion is a doctor who is trying to cure death. In pursuit of this, he has bound ghosts into constructs and killed at least one person, binding their soul to their decaying corpse.

Web Originals

• In the Doctor Locklear series, the aforementioned doctor is called crazy many times. And considering what he does to his victims and that he apparently talks to a wall in xMadame-Macabrex's comic, he probably is.
• It's unclear what Doctor Steel is a doctor of, but he is attended by sexy nurses.
• Dreamscape: One of Melinda's Mooks in "The Mystery of Melinda" was one of these, and he was a key factor in Betty finding out about Melinda and breaking her seal.
• In Perpetual Change, Dr. Mangum is revealed to be one of these.
• Dr. Emily Grey from Red vs. Blue. More specifically, she interrogates a Space Pirate by gleefully torturing him and taking him apart while singing opera. The main characters are already really weird people, and even they are shocked at how crazy Dr. Grey is.
• The MSPA Fan Adventure Tricorne has Freida, a well-meaning surgeon who forgot the old principle "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" during her time in prison after being framed. She'd try to "improve" people by grafting them stuff like additional arms, and when they'd inevitably freak out, she'd apply emergency anaesthesia and undo the operation, letting them think they had a nightmare. She eventually got around that problem by making her upgrades purely internal.
• In Worm, Bonesaw, a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, is a supervillain surgeon who inflicts Body Horror on people for her own amusement.

Web Videos

• Wilbur Soot plays the role of one "Dr. Malpractice" in the Surgery mod video in The Funniest Minecraft Videos Ever. His name is an apt description of his practices.
• Mortal Kombat: Rebirth: This incarnation of Baraka is a former plastic surgeon named Alan Zane who went mad and became a serial killer after accidentally killing a patient during an operation.
• The Spoony Experiment: Dr. Insano. Mad engineering is his main calling, but he's been known to perform non-consensual surgery from time to time.
• In Thresher, the unnamed protagonist is apparently subject to some kind of psychic experimentation. It doesn't end well for anyone.
• Unwanted Houseguest: Doctor Litchfield. His medical license was actually revoked years ago.

Western Animation

• Aaahh!!! Real Monsters features the "Monster Doctor", whose idea of medicine includes using the earth prong on an electrical plug to give someone a third nostril. A runaway Ickis is seen walking across the camera despite not being responsible, causing his friends to believe that he is responsible.
• Dr. Weird from Aqua Teen Hunger Force isn't just mad. He's just plain daft.
• Dr. Krieger from Archer.
• The Bugs Bunny cartoon "Water Water Every Hare" has an imposing castle with its façade flashing "Mad Scientist" and "Boo" in neon alternately. The scientist himself is short, bald, and has a voice like Vincent Price.
• Inhumanoids has Dr. Herman Mangler, who resembles Dr. Mengele in more than name.
• Mr. Cat takes over this role in the Kaeloo episode "Let's Play Doctors and Nurses", and tries to operate on Quack Quack.
• Dr. Barber in The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack seems a little unhinged which really showed in the episode where everyone in Stormalong became infected with The Black Plague. He seemed like a kid in a candy store.
  • In another episode, he seemed really interested in performing surgery on Flapjack for something that wasn't serious in the first place. Added to the fact that he uses barber tools and doubles as a barber...
  • He was going to test Flapjack for blindness with a harpoon. Although it sort of makes sense; if he wasn't blind, he would probably move before he got impaled through the face.
• The Mickey Mouse short The Mad Doctor. In Name Only. The Mad Doctor himself is closer to Mad Scientist. There's nothing doctorate or curing about his experiments. Besides that, his real name is Dr. XXX.
• One episode of ¡Mucha Lucha! was actually about an evil doctor who threatened to remove the Flea's spleen as a result of a prank the Flea played on him just so he can use said spleen to create a monster made entirely out of internal organs. However, it then turns out that the spleen actually escaped the Flea's body prior to the episode's events, and the spleen for some reason is three times the size of the Flea himself.
• Dr. Dogg in Rex the Runt is pretty crooked and always on the take; most of his treatments consist of beating the patient in the head with a stick, and charging "ten quid" for the privilege.
• When the title character of Rocko's Modern Life gets a nasty case of the flu, he goes to see a doctor who turns out to be an unhinged mental patient. The doctor's bizarre treatments include giving Rocko a prostate exam and shoving his hand through both of Rocko's ears to extract a large buildup of ear wax, but amazingly enough, they work.
• Street Sharks gives us Dr. Paradigm, the Big Bad of the show who cheerfully will get anyone he can get his hands on Strapped to an Operating Table and do not-so-fun stuff with their genetics. He also tries to dissect the sharks when he first catches them. While they're awake and protesting.

Other

• Stage magician Kevin James^note not the The King of Queens star uses a Mad Doctor persona, wearing surgical scrubs onstage while running a chainsaw and the like.

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