We hear a lot about medical malpractice in so many forms, but some stories are almost too wild to comprehend. There is one case from decades ago I simply cannot fathom. Over 50 years ago, a soon-to-be husband named Harold Michael, 21, went to North Hills Passavant Hospital near Pittsburgh to have his undescended testicle retrieved. It should have been a routine procedure.
Devastatingly, however, surgeon Walter Nettrour Sr., 70, “accidentally” removed the man’s penis instead, according to We Got This Covered.
Sadly, Michael was only a few weeks away from his wedding day. Court records indicated that he filed a negligence suit in 1976, which the hospital and physician opted to resolve to save their reputations. Michael was presented with a $300,000 offer, worth more than $1 million today, to settle the case at a pretrial hearing, but he turned it down, according to a newspaper clipping uploaded to Reddit. The article alleged that one participant claimed “even the judge laughed” at the inadequate offer.
He ultimately received around $825,000, which is valued at approximately $4,700,000 by today’s standards. All that Nettrour is on record saying about the case was “It’s a shame about the boy. I don’t want to say anymore than that. My attorney doesn’t want me to talk about the case.”
In May 1974, 21-year-old Harold Michael was admitted to North Hills Passavant Hospital for surgery to correct an undescended testicle, just before his wedding. The doctor Walter Nettrour Sr mistakenly amputated Harold’s penis.
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Redditors had a myriad of questions around the unearthed case.
“Seriously questioning why the other staff in the room didn’t say anything,” asked one Redditor, as another echoed their sentiment, writing, “What was the surgical assistant doing?”
This, sadly, wasn’t even the last time something like this has happened. In 2003, Herschel Ralls went in to have his bladder removal surgery and instead his penis was removed, as he and his wife detailed to Oprah Winfrey on her talk show. In 2011, Phillip Seaton went to get circumcised and woke up with no penis, according to CBS. In addition, the BBC reported that a Mexican surgeon was arrested in 2002 after accidentally cutting off a patient’s penis during a circumcision surgery.
