"The San Quentin prison doctor who performed over 10,000 human experiments"

Nightmare fuel:

He was born in 1886 in Polk County, Oregon to a country doctor. They moved to California when Leo was nine and he graduated from Paso Robles High before starting at Stanford in 1903.

A year later, Stanley was flat broke. He dropped out and got a job as a peanut butcher — slang for newsboy — on the Southern Pacific railway.

“I believe that one year as a peanut butcher was better than a whole at Stanford,” he said in an oral history with the Marin County Free Library in the 1970s. “I learned to know people. I learned to merchandise, to sell."

Selling was a strong suit of Stanley’s, and he sold nothing more vigorously than himself. He eventually returned to Stanford and finished his schooling, becoming a doctor. But then he fell in love and needed a steady job to support his new wife. He offered up his services at San Quentin, which hired him in 1913 to be their chief surgeon. At the time, he had no surgical experience.

*Previously: "the Trump Era Has Wreaked Havoc on Washington’s Plastic Surgery Schedules"