
“I gathered very quickly that everything that he had accomplished in sports had come with the sweat equity. “He’d be, ‘Coach, I promise I can get this, let me do it again.’ He’d go through he’d screw it up again,” he said. Death.ĭuntsch and his siblings attended an evangelical Christian school and were raised by a stay-at-home mother and their physical therapist father.ĭuntsch’s early passion was football. He earned a scholarship to play from Millsaps College in Mississippi and later earned a spot as a walk-on player at Colorado State, ProPublica reports.ĭuntsch seemed determined to make it as football player-relentlessly working out and trying to master the plays-despite a lack of elite talent. Fellow teammate Chris Dozois told the news outlet that Duntsch struggled with mastering many of the plays but would beg to repeat them again and again. Joshua Jackson as Christopher Duntsch in Dr. “This defendant singlehandedly ruined their lives, and he gave each of them a life of pain,” prosecutor Michelle Shughart said of his multiple victims during her closing arguments at trial, according to Esquire.īefore Duntsch would earn his deadly nickname, he had a seemingly average upbringing.ĭuntsch was born in Montana before moving to Memphis with his family when he was in junior high, according to the “Dr.

Death” and later allowing him to make history of another kind-becoming the first doctor ever convicted of aggravated assault for care provided in the operating room. Prosecutors would later tell CNBC’s “American Greed” that Duntsch injured 33 out of his 38 patients in less than two years, earning him the nickname “Dr. Death: The Undoctored Story" on Peacock, which features interviews with numerous people intimately involved in the case.)ĭuntsch was recruited to join a private practice in Dallas that specialized in minimally invasive spinal surgery, according to Goodman’s D Magazine piece. It was a lucrative position, paying $600,000 a year, and Duntsch was soon granted surgical privileges as a spine surgeon at Baylor Medical Center in Plano, now known as Baylor Scott and White Medical Center. But it wouldn’t be long before colleagues and his patients would question his ostensibly impeccable credentials. (And if you want to dive even deeper into the story, you can also watch the new docuseries "Dr. Death,” starring Joshua Jackson, Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin. The story of his dramatic fall from grace, which resulted in the revocation of his medical license and a conviction for maiming a patient, is the focus of the new Peacock limited series “Dr.

“His resume looked brilliant on paper,” journalist Matt Goodman, who wrote a profile of Duntsch for D Magazine in 2016, said in an episode of Oxygen’s “License to Kill.”īut in the operating room it was a different story entirely. He botched numerous surgeries between 2011 and 2013, leaving dozens of his patients either in chronic pain, paralyzed, or in some cases dead. His resume included a combined MD/PhD program and neurosurgical residency at The University of Tennessee at Memphis College of Medicine and was bolstered by a prestigious spine surgery fellowship in the city, a research patent under his name and published academic papers.
Christopher Duntsch had the hallmarks of an impressive neurosurgeon, at least in theory.
