A review by balletbookworm
The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetuated in the Name of Science by Sam Kean

4.0

Read this in clinic between subjects - an ideal book for this since the chapters are all nicely divided up. Kean is a good storyteller of science history and this book is basically "what happens when scientists go bad". Some of them were pretty awful to start with, some got on that slippery slope of "justifying their actions" and wind up being terrible/making terrible decisions.

CW for, well, it's about scientists throughout history going bad so there's racism, slavery/slave trading, bad ethics, animal mistreatment, abuse of patients, somewhat graphic descriptions of surgical prodecures, etc.