In Culture
The two spinster aunts in Joseph Kesselring's play Arsenic and Old Lace act as angels of mercy for lonely old men, poisoning them with elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine and cyanide.
The character Annie Wilkes in the Stephen King novel Misery seems to be a serial killer of this type. Additionally, "Angel of mercy" is mentioned in Agatha Christie's novel By the Pricking of My Thumbs. The novel The 5th Horseman in James Patterson's Women's Murder Club series features an "Angel of Mercy" serial killer. The term is also mentioned in a Fear Factory song "Demanufacture".
In the television series Dexter, Dexter Morgan's first kill is his father's nurse, an angel of mercy, who worked in the fictional Angel of Mercy Hospital.
In the television series "Elementary", Season 1, Episode 5 "Lesser Evils", Sherlock Holmes solves a case of series of angel of death's murders.
Read more about this topic: Angel Of Mercy (criminology)
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)
“He was one whose glory was an inner glory, one who placed culture above prosperity, fairness above profit, generosity above possessions, hospitality above comfort, courtesy above triumph, courage above safety, kindness above personal welfare, honor above success.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 1 (1962)