Case of the Dirty Needle

Albert L. Weiner certainly was not the best psychiatrist in New Jersey, but he was very likely the fastest. As many as 50 patients a day from the Camden-Philadelphia area crowded into his office-home in Erlton. A doctor of osteopathy, with psychiatric training in osteopathic clinics in Los Angeles and Tulsa, Weiner distributed his patients in four treatment rooms and hurried from one to another giving treatment. Last week a Camden jury found Weiner guilty on twelve counts of manslaughter: as a result of his treatment, twelve patients died, and many more became gravely ill. He faced prison sentences adding up to 120 years.

The sickness that they suffered from was serum hepatitis ("needle jaundice"), the form of the disease in which the virus goes from one bloodstream to another by means of unsterilized or insufficiently sterilized injection equipment. In his high-speed psychiatry, Weiner had freely used injections and infusions, and, the jury held, was criminally negligent in failing to sterilize his equipment.

Dr. Alexander Langmuir, chief epidemiologist for the U.S. Public Health Service, testified that in the ten months ending October 1960, the national rate for all viral hepatitis was 26 per 100,000. But among Weiner's 329 patients for the period, 40 were diagnosed as having hepatitis, "for an astronomical rate of 12,000 per 100,000." Expert witnesses agreed that this could not have been by chance.

The judge ruled that if hepatitis caused the deaths, the jury must decide whether Weiner's negligence caused his patients to get the disease. From the dead there was only the dubious testimony of death certificates, but patients who had recovered from hepatitis painted a gruesome picture. Weiner relied heavily on electroshock treatments, and estimated that for these he gave infusions of a muscle relaxant in one out of ten cases. He also used narcoanalysis. injecting a barbiturate into an arm vein. Patient after patient testified that he had seen blood from previous use at the ends of syringes and plastic infusion tubes. Said one: "I didn't know whether it was supposed to be there or not."

Like most such oddball practitioners, Weiner had loyal defenders and produced some incidental benefits. One patient said she would still go back to him for treatment, though she had contracted hepatitis. Albert Briegel, 24, of Langhorne, Pa., gave Weiner credit for stopping his drinking. "I slowed down," said Briegel of the time that he was under treatment, "but when I got hepatitis, I had to stop." A widow and a widower, whose earlier spouses had been among the dead hepatitis victims, quickly got married again--to each other.

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