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Richard Littledale

Richard Littledale's
Views on the News: February 2000

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The man who played God
"Each of your victims was your patient.

"You murdered each and every one ... by a calculating and cold-blooded perversion of your medical skills."

Mr Justice Forbes addressing Dr Harold Shipman
(the man who played God)
on 1 February 2000

 

 

 

 

 

"...and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient under death - even death on a cross."

Paul describing Jesus
(the God who became man)
about 62 AD

The storm has broken. All the pent up superlatives which the journalists have reserved throughout the long days of the Shipman trial have been released like a pack of Greek furies. Now they swarm across the pages of our newspapers bringing in their wake an escalating death toll, increasingly murky revelations about Shipman's past and a cloud of suspicion over every doctor's surgery in the land. The same people who once generalised that all nurses were wonderful will now suggest that no doctor can be trusted.

Perhaps the hyperbole is understandable given the enormity of the crime. To break the Hippocratic oath once and betray a patient's trust is criminal, to do so 15 or more times is monstrous. However, one area where the reporters and columnists are struggling for adjectives is that of motive. If the motive were money Dr Shipman would be "greedy", if it were a personal vendetta against these people he would be "crazed" or "angered". As it is, we have to face the sinister prospect that he enjoyed the ability to inflict death at will - the man who played God.

However, convenient though that epithet may be, it will not do. There is no evidence that God enjoys the power to inflict death, even though he undoubtedly wields it. During the centuries before the birth of Christ, God made repeated entreaties to people to turn from their wickedness and be forgiven, precisely in order to escape death. When those entreaties failed he took the most drastic alternative - God became man. This risky ploy was to result in the death of the god-man Jesus and a break in the cycle of death and destruction which had dogged planet earth from its birth. His subsequent resurrection gives the prospect of hope even in the bleakest moments of human depravity.

Dr Shipman now faces a long sentence, but so do the relatives of his victims. For every time he questions his own actions they will question his motives and their ability to protect those whom they loved. If there is to be any solace it is to be found with the God who became man. He will not alter the past, either for victim or perpetrator, but he can alter the future…

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