Killer Nurse with Hydrochloric Acid, Autopsy Report

Abstract

This particular example is known in the news as the case of the killer nurse. In the end, the nurse was sentenced to 30 years in prison. We describe the unusual case (both the reasons for and the use of an unusual substance in these cases) of a nurse who used hydrochloric acid to kill a patient. To date we are not aware of any such cases having been described in the medical literature. This is a very special case because the nurse did not use a drug to kill the patient, as already described in numerous previous cases, but used a caustic substance: hydrochloric acid.