|
|
"Mature Content Warning!" |
Dr. Udo Heinemann is a minor antagonist in the manga and anime series Monster, appearing in the first two episodes.
He was voiced by Masaru Ikeda in Japanese and Steve Kramer in English.
What Makes Him Pathetic?[]
- He's a greedy and corrupt doctor who doesn't care about saving lives, but about money. He has also influenced several other doctors, such as Dr. Oppenheim and Dr. Boyer, to be corrupt as well.
- He spoils his daughter Eva and has conditioned her to think human lives aren't equal. While he does seem to care for her he's also implied to be abusive in the manga, as Eva says he used to "bellow like thunder" if she was even a minute past curfew.
- He uses his subordinates to write research papers for him and then steals the credit. He even cancels life-saving research Tenma was working on so Tenma can write a speech for him.
- He pulls Tenma out of surgery on an injured Turkish man to have him operate on a famous opera singer who had arrived later (while stealing the credit for saving the opera singer) which results in the Turkish man's death. When he learns of this Heinemann callously dismisses the man's death, saying he's not running a charity and the lives of ordinary people aren't important to him.
- He orders Tenma to walk out of Johan's surgery to operate on the town's mayor despite Johan having come in first, and even when Tenma explains that Johan will likely die if he doesn't operate on him, Heinemann doesn't care and orders Tenma to save the mayor anyway. He cares about the mayor only because he's promised an increase in subsidies for the hospital, saying they can't let him die "just yet."
- While Johan was already a serial killer at this point, Heinemann didn't know this so he could just as easily have caused an innocent child's death.
- He tries to destroy Tenma's career in retaliation for saving Johan against orders, humiliating him at a dinner party with the public announcement that he's been demoted as head neurosurgeon. He then tells Tenma that as long as he's in charge, Tenma will never get a better position and won't be allowed to submit any research papers, sneering that Tenma will never become the doctor he envisioned.
- He orders that Johan and his sister Anna be photographed together as an "emergency image-saver" for the hospital. When he learns Tenma would not approve of this, he orders Tenma removed from caring for Johan and replaced by Dr. Boyer, saying Tenma doesn't deserve to be in the limelight.
- Even Tenma, who's very idealistic and values all lives equally, hates Heinemann fiercely and says in a moment of rage that he'd be better off dead, and while he was shocked when it actually happened, he still has difficulty feeling too sad about it. When he later learns Johan was the killer he is guilt-stricken as he didn't want Johan to become a murderer but still doesn't deny wishing Heinemann dead.
- While his daughter Eva seems to love him and is distraught at his funeral, this is only meant to evoke sympathy for Eva herself and it's undercut when Dr. Becker points out that she's more upset at losing the privileged lifestyle her father provided her than actually caring about him.
- Inspector Lunge, who's investigating his murder, also doesn't waste any time feeling sorry for him and only wants to find the killer because he finds it intellectually stimulating.
What Makes Him a Pinhead?[]
- Despite being the director of the hospital, he doesn't do much other than order his staff to attend to specific patients and is mostly reliant on more skilled people like Tenma. There's a manga-only scene where he proposes the creation of a media healthcare network across Europe, but he doesn't give any details about how he would accomplish this and Tenma's reaction suggests the plan is unfeasible.
- He fails to cover up his blatant corruption, to the point that most of the other doctors know about it. The only reason Tenma didn't find out sooner is that he was too naive to look into it.
- He lacks the skill to write his own theses and instead has his subordinates write them, and fails to cover this up as Tenma was able to deduce that the research paper that first inspired him was not written by Heinemann but by one of his teaching assistants.
- He's unable to come up with a convincing pretext for pulling Tenma out of surgery, expecting Tenma to blindly obey him.
- He puts his corruption over even pragmatic concerns, as shown when he orders all his best doctors to attend to the mayor and not Johan, despite Johan being a recently orphaned child which means he should have seen the value in saving him as negligently letting him die would be a disaster for the hospitals' image.
- He's pointlessly vindictive against Tenma as he tries to ruin his career to the point Tenma considers quitting, despite Tenma being the most (and arguably only) competent surgeon in the hospital and someone he can't afford to lose. He also lets Dr. Boyer overwork Tenma following his demotion which could have endangered other patients.
- While he's shown in the manga to be involved in backroom deals to become the next chairman of the board, this seems to merely consist of him using his status to pressure others to support him which doesn't take much intelligence.
- He steals candy Johan was sent as a get-well present out of sheer pettiness, thinking Johan was unconscious, which causes his own death along with that of Oppenheim and Boyer as Johan had anticipated he would do this and poisoned the candy.