“A man with a fetish for medical items has become the first person to be banned from every hospital in England and Wales, the NHS says. Unemployed Norman Hutchins, 53, has harassed and abused medical staff more than 40 times since January in his quest for surgical masks and gowns… Hutchins tried to obtain medical items by feigning illness, or claiming to need them for a fancy dress run or an amateur play… ‘(He has) caused harassment, alarm and distress to NHS staff when attempting to obtain gowns and surgical masks in person or on the phone,’ an NHS spokesman said in a statement… Hutchins’ lawyer Harry Bayman said his client ‘was not a well man’, but accepted the court’s decision.” — Reuters (UK)

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

Now that is a lawyer who is looking out for his client’s worst interests. The fetishist gets himself bannned from every medical facility in the UK except when he obviously needs medical treatment, and even then he must submit to “strictly controlled conditions.” So what does his lawyer tell the court? The perp is “not a well man” — which obviously implies he needs medical or at least psychiatric help. So maybe if he can’t get scrubs or surgical masks to satisfy his insatiable Hippocratic cravings, at least his lawyer has him set up to steal some old volumes of Freud from the shrink he’ll no doubt be visiting soon. And that would certainly be a novel form of psychiatric “transference.”

The other thing you can’t help but notice about this guy is that he was unemployed. There’s an old saying in German, something to the effect that idle hands do the devil’s work. Which makes you wonder if the best cure for pathological behavior might not just be a dumb job. Get this guy on the back of a garbage truck hoisting cans off the street and he won’t have time to travel from hospital to clinic and back again. Or then again, fetishistic behavior being what it is, he might just raid the bins of biohazardous waste behind the offices of the local dentists and urologists.

UPDATE 21 January 2005. “A British man with a sexual fetish for tie-on surgical masks was jailed today for telephoning hospitals and dental surgeries around the country to ask for supplies to be sent to him. Norman Hutchins, 53, was jailed for three years… ‘You are a serial offender. You have a worrying obsession with medical and dental equipment and with medical and dental institutions. You caused bother to the staff there. You are manipulative and deceptive. You play on the victim’s good nature,’ the judge said. ‘It appears you get a sexual kick out of obtaining these things. You have done this sort of thing repeatedly. You are in my mind an absolute menace to anyone involved in medical or dental institutions.’” (Thanks to alanr for the link.)

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