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 Hagmann was escorted off the Uniformed Services University campus
in Maryland, and the college quickly offered students blood tests to
determine if they had been exposed to any diseases, school President
Charles Rice said. The college also launched an internal
investigation into Hagmann’s conduct, and it forwarded information
to law enforcement authorities and the Virginia Board of Medicine,
which revoked Hagmann’s license last month.
“We took immediate steps,” Rice said.
But records reviewed by Reuters, including the university’s own
investigation, show that school officials had known of Hagmann’s
teaching methods for more than 20 years. The records also show that
three faculty members sat in on Hagmann’s course in 2012 but did not
alert their superiors, despite witnessing practices that the school
has since banned. One former dean even pushed to have Hagmann
court-martialed in 1993 over similar allegations, records show.
“The university’s culpability casts a wide net,” according to the
school’s internal review, dated December 2013. The document includes
27 pages of findings and 45 exhibits that total more than 350 pages.
It was obtained by Reuters under the Freedom of Information Act.
 The Virginia medical board concluded in June that Hagmann, 59,
exploited students he trained in 2012 and 2013 at sessions in
Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado and Great Britain. Some of those
students testified that Hagmann performed penile nerve blocks and
instructed them to insert catheters into one another’s genitals.
“The evidence is so overwhelming and so bizarre as to almost shock
the conscience of a prosecutor who’s been doing this for 26 years,”
Assistant Attorney General Frank Pedrotty told the board in June.
Hagmann's courses in treating battlefield wounds were popular with
the U.S. government, however. Since 2007, his company, Deployment
Medicine International, has received at least $10.5 million in
federal contracts from government agencies, including the FBI and
U.S. Special Forces.
DR. HAGMANN'S DEFENSE
Hagmann has denied any wrongdoing and vowed to appeal the revocation
of his license. In an email to Reuters this week, he wrote that “the
views of the civilian Board of Medicine and the academic
institutions do not match the reality of law enforcement, other
military, and special operations medical support training – or real
missions.” None of the “over 1,000 physicians” who he says have
taken his courses “felt the training was dangerous or inappropriate
– only one medical student who recruited other students to
complain.”
In June, Hagmann told Reuters that university officials long
condoned his teaching techniques, which he says saves lives on the
battlefield.
“The same institution that is now making a complaint originally
supported and encouraged the programs,” Hagmann said then.
In some ways, the university’s internal review reflects Hagmann’s
claim that the school tacitly supported his approach to teaching
battlefield medicine. Rice, who became school president in 2006,
acknowledged that “there were flaws and gaps” in the university's
oversight.
In 1986, during his second year as a professor at the university,
Hagmann created a course to give students field experience treating
combat wounds, the report says.
By the early 1990s, documents show, his techniques were similar to
those that cost him his license this year: Students in his class
performed procedures on one another and were provided nitrous oxide,
also known as laughing gas, as well as a drug to treat insomnia and
the antihistamine Benadryl, the report says.
In sworn statements that are part of the report, unidentified
colleagues offered varied descriptions of Hagmann: “an iconoclast
and a cowboy,” someone who had “an almost magical spell-like effect
on people,” and an officer “on a righteous mission ... impatient
with government rules.”
“He has a pied piper mentality,” Rice said.
A MANAGEMENT PROBLEM
Some at the school, including Hagmann’s direct supervisor while he
was on staff there, found him difficult. “I had to ride herd over
him,” Colonel Craig Llewellyn told the school’s investigator. “He
kept toying with things, playing fast and loose...” In a brief
interview, Llewellyn said Hagmann repeatedly violated administrative
rules.
In 1993, the report says, a dean at the school became so alarmed by
Hagmann’s methods that she told a commandant that Hagmann should be
court-martialed. It does not name the dean, who has since died, but
the report says an unidentified official at the school determined
that Hagmann’s conduct was not a military matter but an academic
one.
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The specific steps the university took in 1993 in response to the
dean’s complaints remain unclear. The school did investigate the
concerns and interviewed Hagmann and his supervisors.
But the 2013 report takes officials to task for failing to stop
Hagmann then. “Despite the dean’s grave concerns, the course
continued…” the report says. “In any other unit, a troubled course …
would have been discontinued immediately.”
Seven years later, in 2000, Hagmann retired from the university
after he received a “less than favorable” performance review,
according to the report. Shortly thereafter, Hagmann started his
private training company, and the business of training troops to
treat battlefield trauma boomed as wars raged in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Then, around 2007, Hagmann returned to the school “unofficially,”
the report says. He began co-teaching a course, and by 2012, he was
teaching a summer class on his own.
The report contends that Hagmann used the university “to subsidize
his business.” Students provided free labor to help support his
consulting company. And because he waived course tuition – about
$2,000 per student – the school allowed him to use its classrooms
for his private clients, the report says. Hagmann, in an email to
Reuters, disputed the characterization.
Whatever the case, his teaching methods remained controversial. In
addition to inducing shock by withdrawing blood from students,
Hagmann plied class members with alcohol and had students perform
penile nerve blocks on one another and on him, the report says. Two
students told the Virginia medical board they have scars on their
chests from class demonstrations.
"TOO FAR OUT"
One university professor, Patricia Deuster, was “shocked and
dumbfounded” to learn Hagmann and his class had returned in 2012,
the report says. Deuster, who declined to comment to Reuters, has
taught at the school since 1984 and edited The Navy SEAL Physical
Fitness Guide. “He was too far out on the edge,” Deuster told the
school’s investigator.
The three doctors who allegedly witnessed Hagmann’s teaching but did
not report the drug and shock demonstrations in 2012 no longer teach
at the university, Rice said. He declined to identify them, and
their names are redacted from the records.
The official who handled the school’s investigation, Colonel Neil
Page, declined to comment. In his report, Page sharply criticizes
the three former instructors.
“Medical doctors and educators should have prevented this kind of
demonstration, or should have asked serious questions over the
purpose and safety,” he wrote.
At the time, the medical school did not have a policy against
instructors using students as test subjects. Rice said the school
has since created one.
Thus, among Hagmann’s legacies, is an asterisk in the student
handbook with this reminder: “School of Medicine policy prohibits
instructors or medical students from requesting medical students
from serving as ‘patients’ for intrusive examinations or procedures,
such as a rectal or genitourinary exam.”
Rice, who served as trauma surgeon to President George H.W. Bush,
said the Hagmann matter is the most bizarre situation he has known
in 40 years of government service.
“He shouldn’t be a physician,” Rice said. “He lost his compass
somewhere.”
(Reporting by John Shiffman. Edited by Blake Morrison)
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