The Icepick Surgeon review by Josh

Maybe 3.5 stars?

This Icepick Surgeon is a collection of stories - I wasn't surprised to learn Kean is a podcaster as each chapter feels like an episode in a series connected only by the very general theme of people doing bad things in some way connected to science or medicine.

Some of these tales are interesting, some less so, but the connections between them seem loose at best. Kean's moral commentary is tedious and uninsightful. He seems driven to evaluate the personal culpability and moral worth of everyone in the book, and judge their "sinful" behavior (Kean talks about "sin" more than an angry preacher).

Some of the stories Cutler recounted were familiar to me, but in all cases I learned some, generally unappetizing, new details. I knew that Thomas Edison had an elephant electrocuted to demonstrate the dangers DC power, I didn't know that an associate killed hundreds of dogs and various other animals to large audiences to really drive the point home. I knew about the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis study, but not about the (arguably worse) Guatemala Syphilis experiment.

The book would be better, and shorter, if Kean stuck to the facts and left his moralizing at home. That's not to say his pontifications are wrong - plenty of the folks profiled did dreadful things. But, the reader can decide how bad those things were and what to think about the people for themselves based on the facts of the case without Kean's commentary or his attempts to tie them together into a coherent account of the importance of morality in science.