The fake doctor’s impersonation of the doctor in medical practice

The fake doctor’s impersonation of the doctor in medical practice grew out of a wartime working relationship and became a long-running arrangement in which medical skill, personal loyalty, livelihood, and legal identity were difficult to separate. The fake doctor performed much of the care while the Army Medical Captain’s name supplied the public and official identity of the practice. Their arrangement was not simply a disguise imposed on an unsuspecting physician: the doctor knew of and, at important stages, accepted the impersonation, even as illness and dependence made the balance between them increasingly unstable.

Wartime Origins

The relationship began before the end of the war, when the future fake doctor was assigned as an orderly to the Army Medical Captain in a field hospital. The doctor was absorbed in research into producing sugar from wood, a project prompted by wartime scarcity. As a result, the orderly took on a substantial share of patient examinations and treatment. He later described himself as having a good memory and a particularly capable hand, and said that the doctor guided him through complicated operations. The early division of labor therefore preceded their civilian clinic: practical medical responsibility was already passing to the orderly while the doctor’s name and guidance remained central.

The orderly also became involved in supplying the doctor with drugs. By the end of the war, he said, the doctor had developed an addiction. The two were demobilized together, and the relationship continued into civilian life rather than ending with their military service. This history gave the later impersonation a personal rationale as well as a professional one: the fake doctor presented his continued involvement partly as loyalty to a former superior and friend whose condition he believed he could not simply abandon.

The Clinic and Borrowed Identity

After demobilization, the two worked together to open a clinic. The fake doctor acted as the doctor’s assistant in both its management and its medical practice, while the Army Medical Captain, increasingly unable to examine or treat patients himself, conveyed instructions through medical charts. The fake doctor’s account makes clear that the practical arrangement was unequal: he carried out much of the work, but the practice initially retained the doctor’s name and authority.

The fake doctor identified several reasons for continuing. He said that maintaining the supply of drugs for the Army Medical Captain was an act of friendship, for which he accepted responsibility; he also acknowledged that practicing under the doctor’s qualifications guaranteed his livelihood. He denied exploiting the doctor’s vulnerability for personal advantage, noting that Nana controlled the accounts. Alongside these obligations and benefits, the practice became a source of professional identity. He described gaining patients’ trust, receiving recognition for his skill, and developing a stronger interest in medicine. He studied current medical books and specialist reviews, and cited twelve years of experience as a source of confidence, while conceding that competence and conscientiousness did not make unauthorized practice lawful.

His reported surgical proficiency, including work such as appendectomies, and his claim that patients trusted him complicate the distinction between practical ability and recognized professional status. In his own defense, he contrasted his experience with diagnoses he considered mistaken at other hospitals, but expressly did not treat that comparison as an excuse. The relationship thus rested on two different forms of authority: the doctor’s borrowed credentials and the fake doctor’s growing command of the work. Neither patient confidence nor technical confidence erased the legal problem he acknowledged.

Formal Impersonation and Household Tensions

The arrangement changed markedly during the eighth year of the doctor’s practice. The fake doctor said he had previously left external contacts, such as attendance at medical meetings, to the Army Medical Captain. As the doctor’s speech and conduct became conspicuously abnormal, reports questioning his condition reached them. They were also under investigation because of the clinic’s excessive drug use. After discussing the situation, they closed the clinic and moved to another city.

The doctor’s condition then worsened, and, according to the fake doctor, his suicidal inclination became increasingly evident. At Nana’s suggestion, the doctor stopped appearing publicly, and the fake doctor registered himself as the doctor. The account presents this not as a unilateral fraud hidden from the person impersonated, but as a plan to which the Army Medical Captain fully agreed. The patients continued to trust the fake doctor in the new city, reinforcing the practical success of the substitution without resolving its illegality.

Nana was central to the arrangement’s domestic and financial circumstances. She had originally been the Army Medical Captain’s legal wife, helped the fake doctor as a nurse, and managed the accounts. The fake doctor said that he and Nana lived together with the doctor’s understanding and approval, and that she remained involved in the clinic’s finances. Their relationship changed after he hired Toyama Yoko as a new apprentice nurse. Nana objected and proposed that they live apart; he agreed, though he said he continued to report income and expenses to her and recognize her rights as co-manager. The household separation did not immediately end their business connection.

Dependence, Conflict, and Admission

The fake doctor described the Army Medical Captain as resisting any decision to end the practice. The doctor flattered him and repeatedly invoked the possibility of suicide if he stopped working, while seeking larger quantities of drugs. The doctor also made demands concerning Toyama Yoko that troubled the fake doctor. These details expose a relationship in which professional dependence and personal leverage ran both ways: the doctor relied on the fake doctor’s labor and access to drugs, while the fake doctor felt responsible for the doctor and benefited from the practice conducted under his identity. He nevertheless said he bore no bitterness toward the doctor, whose illness he considered deserving of sympathy.

By the time he prepared his account, the fake doctor argued that the Army Medical Captain no longer needed his assistance and that he was no longer obliged to continue deceiving the public through illegal practice. He recognized that unauthorized treatment could harm patients both economically and physically, and rejected the doctor’s view that an offense disappears if no injured person makes a claim. He intended to disclose the arrangement and accepted that breaking the law remained wrong, even though he maintained that patients had trusted him and that he had not understood himself to be causing them injury.

The disclosure was tied to the discovery of the Army Medical Captain’s corpse. The fake doctor identified the body as that of the physician whose names he had borrowed and said he regretted failing to prevent the doctor’s death, given the doctor’s earlier risk of suicide. He also explained that the doctor had long opposed his abandoning the work, a circumstance that made the decision to confess inseparable from the end of their professional arrangement. The account leaves the impersonation with a double significance: it records a transfer of everyday medical responsibility to the more active practitioner, but also the continued dependence on a borrowed identity that the practitioner ultimately acknowledged as a crime.