Medicine: The Strange Case of J. H. Phillips

Everybody liked hard, stocky, fiery-eyed Dr. Phillips, the new assistant chief surgeon at Enloe Hospital in Chico, Calif.

Fellow physicians watched admiringly as he sliced out tonsils, neatly opened countless abdomens, knowingly probed the visceral coils for appendices and other disorders. Patients flocked to him. Dr. Phillips, they told their friends, “had a dynamic personality,” a reassuring air of competence.

Surgeon Phillips had been no less popular at the California CCC camp where he practiced before moving to Chico. The boys called him “the operating fool.”

Often he removed tonsils without anesthetics.

One day last May Special Agent Joseph Williams of the California State Board of Medical Examiners went to Chico to investigate irregularities in another doctor’s prescriptions. By chance, as he plowed through drugstore records, he also noticed something queer about Dr. Phillips’ prescriptions. Medically they were perfect. But they were signed J. H. Phillips instead of James H. Phillips.

California law requires doctors to sign prescriptions with their first name in full.

Investigation led to “Doc” Phillips’ arrest for practicing medicine in California without a State license. Three hours of questioning disclosed that he lacked a good deal more than a license. He was not a doctor at all. At first he insisted he had taken a few courses at the University of Buffalo, later admitted that his higher education consisted chiefly of a correspondence course in placer mining. He had spent half of the last 20 years in prison cells for impersonating federal officers, passing worthless checks, selling narcotics, defrauding hotels and practicing medicine without a license in several states. While serving time in Atlanta’s Federal penitentiary in 1923, he had tried to get himself a fake medical diploma, failed.

Phillips (whose real name is Arthur Osborne Phillips) finally got a diploma from the University of Tennessee medical college in 1930 by posing as the James Herman Phillips (no relation) who graduated from that school in 1916. Impostor Phillips had served as orderly to the real Dr. James H. Phillips in the Army Medical Corps in World War I. He picked up more medical lore and tricks of surgery in prison hospitals. He made one modest attempt to come up the hard way: a brief internship (1930) in a West Virginia hospital, from which he was dismissed for “unprofessional conduct.”

When his full record was revealed (last fortnight the A.M.A. Journal printed it with reluctant admiration), his Chico colleagues were dazed. “How he was able to perform all those operations successfully is what has us baffled,” murmured one doctor uncomfortably. Said others: “The man’s got something besides guts.” Phillips piled the nervous strain of imposture atop the nervous strain of surgery which exhausts many accredited surgeons. But so far not one of the scores of patients whom Phillips cut open has complained of the quality of his work.

From his latest cell, where he must spend six months for practicing medicine without a license, nine months for carrying a revolver without a permit, Phillips explained his success. Said he: “The secret of my success in medicine and surgery is that I was able to build a better mousetrap.”