One person that was built-up as awesomesauce but turned out to be a whole lotta nothing was Mother Teresa.....
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa
Yeah, I did some research, and "Rational"Wiki is full of shit. A lot of the anti-Mother Teresa movement is based on misunderstandings.
Mother Theresa's entire operation was about an absolute open door policy.
Nobody could be turned aside, nobody would be left on the streets, etc. This meant that her hospices (
not hospitals!) focused more on quantity than quality, given that Calcutta actually has a quite a few poor people, especially back then. The anti-Mother Theresa movement or whatever is entirely fueled by a firm inability or refusal to understand her aims or the context in which she worked.
I mean, people criticize her all the time for her hospices (again,
not hospitals) not being up to the standard of a western hospital. But she was in fucking Calcutta, and well before India's economy started taking off, not London.
Additionally, the medicines she refused to use were explicitly
pain medications. She eschewed the traditional negotiated death that hospices usually provide in favor of a lucid death. As a result, she'd use weaker, cheaper painkillers in place of opiates and the like. She did not play the game of giving medications that would hasten death but relieve suffering. And that's assuming she could even
get opiates, which were heavily restricted in India at the time.
Was Mother Teresa perfect? No. Did she have flaws? Absolutely. Was she as bad as Hitchens said she was?
Hell no!
