Crispin Sartwell on the alleged euthenasias during Hurricane Katrina:

There was no power, and hence no monitoring or life-support equipment. The temperatures inside the hospital hovered around 110 degrees during the day. The bodies of those who had died at the hospital before the storm were decomposing. There was no running water, and routine sanitation procedures were impossible.

Family members of patients and staff and people from the neighborhood took shelter in the hospital, and they ran out of food and all other necessities.

In such conditions, terminally ill patients must have suffered immeasurably. And their caregivers must have suffered with them. They were unable to provide even basic palliative care: effective treatment for pain or relief of basic breathing, nutritional or circulatory problems, for instance.

[...]

To prosecute doctors or nurses who may have hastened some of those deaths would be obscene. They faced conditions that we cannot really imagine, challenges to their identities and oaths as healers that were impossible to resolve. Whatever decisions they made, they made in prayer: They made in the midst of what could only have been the deepest and most tortured encounter with their own consciences.

[...]

The medical community in Memorial Medical Center — the administrators, the doctors, the nurses and the patients — were abandoned by the law and all the institutions that uphold it. Those in those institutions who would sit in judgment of the conscientious decisions of that community indict only themselves.

This is an important column. I can’t possibly imagine what went through those doctors’ and nurses’ minds. I certainly know I’m in no place to sit in judgment of them. Law ceased to exist for a while in New Orleans. I’m with Sartwell. It would be absurd for anyone to pretend to know what they should have done, or to apply the law as it exists now to a time and place where social order, law, and probity were suspended. By all accounts, the professionals in that hospital did what they thought was best for the patients in their charge with the circumstances they were given.

Leave them be. Move on.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2005 at 10:04 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.