I recently read about the famous Nazis doctor, Josef Mengele, who conducted experiments on the prisoners at Auschwitz. The experiments were horrific and so terrible it is difficult to write about them. He performed freezing experiments to determine the temperature at which the human body freezes and high altitude studies, in a compression chamber, to determine the altitude at which death occurs. He loved to study twins and would kill them by injecting chloroform into their heart and then perform autopsies. He removed stomachs and other internal organs without anesthesia and even removed a person’s heart while they were still conscious. He injected eyes in an attempt to change color and crushed skulls to determine the force required to produce a fracture. He tried many experiments to produce sterilization. The list goes on. Mengele escaped Nazis Germany and lived in South America until he died of a stroke at an old age.

One of my favorite doctors of early Texas had some unorthodox ideas about the punishment of prisoners and perverts. Ferdinand Daniel was a brilliant physician who was in the Civil War. After returning from the war he settled in Galveston and helped start the first medical school in the state. He was a terrific writer who published the first medical journal in Texas and wrote two excellent books. He founded the Texas Board of Health and was the one who started keeping records of the number of births and deaths in the state. He initiated many public health projects such as water purification, sewage and garage disposal, and immunization. He was president of every medical organization known, including the Texas Medical Association. On the darker side, he believed in sterilization of perverts and recommended that prisoners on death row be used for experimentation since they were going to be put to death anyway. He was against mixed marriages. He was a genius but his ethics a little warped. He is pictured above.

We need Mengele or Daniel today to be in charge of perverts who are imprisoned for child molestation. I would like to see them get hold of the guy who was recently arrested in California for kidnapping an 11 year old girl and making her a sex slave for 18 years. She gave birth to two of his children and never saw a physician or left his back yard where she lived in primitive conditions with her two children for 18 long years. There is no punishment that would be too severe for this deranged manic and only Mengele or Daniel could think up something appropriate.

These guys would also have served well as interrogators of terrorist suspects. They wouldn’t have needed the CIA to tell them how to get information and wouldn’t care what Eric Holder or Obama thought about their tactics. If they had been in charge of interrogations perhaps we would have already captured Osama bin Laden.

Mengele or Daniel might even be interesting company on the porch. They could help me come up with a final solution for the deer.