Unlicensed doctor inadvertently kills patient, then dismembers body and throws it in river

By Zoey Zha, February 5, 2015

On January 31, a sanitation worker in Fujian provincial capital Fuzhou found a dismembered corpse hidden inside two burlap sack as they floated along a city river.

The victim, a 39-year-old janitor at Guangming Shijia Community, hadn't been heard from since he complained of feeling ill and said he was going to a nearby medical clinic for a checkup.

Zheng’s daughter Xiaomei had tried to find him at his workplace after he didn't return overnight. The office contacted her aunt to make inquiries while dispatching other staff members to start searching for Zheng after learning that he had gone to a local clinic the day before missing. “He said that hospitals would cost too much, so he went to a clinic near Lianyang Lu instead,” Xiaomei recalled.

The clinic in question, located at the intersection of Lianyang Lu and Fuguang Nan Lu, turned out to be no more than a shabby one-room apartment equipped with only the most basic of furniture - a table, a chair and a bed - and no medical devices at all. There weren't even any proper signs, just board on which the 'doctor' scribbled his areas of expertise. The sanitary conditions, to say the least, were unsatisfactory.

After learning about the street sweeper's grim discovery, Zheng's sister went to confirm the body's identity. “The police told us that the suspect had been apprehended as he tried to escape to Sichuan,” she told reporters.

Precise details haven't been released at this early stage in the investigation, but police have suggested that Zheng’s death was the direct result of of malpractice, saying that the doctor, who lacked any medical certification, applied the "wrong medicine." Instead of turning himself in, the doctor then disposed of Zheng's body by cutting it up into manageable pieces and tossing it into the river.

Unlicensed "black" clinics such as this one operate under the radar of the law in communities throughout China, where they offer cut-rate medical services to poorer residents unable to afford hospital fees. The only catch: the so-called doctors often have less than a WebMD-level knowledge of medicine, and their treatments vary from the ineffective to the downright medieval. An 11-year-old boy died just last month in Henan after a local quack decided to treat his swollen throat was a course of bloodletting - to the jugular.

[Images via Nhaidu]