I had heard reports that doctors and nurses in hospitals and makeshift clinics set up in the field have had to perform triage, i.e. deciding which patients should get medical care and supplies, when time and supplies were both running out. That’s tragic, but understandable.
It’s also a world away from taking active steps to euthanize patients, but that’s exactly what was happening too.
Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leave them to die in agony as they evacuated.
With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.
One New Orleans doctor told how she “prayed for God to have mercy on her soul” after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.
What do the looters and rapists have to do with giving critical care to patients? This is where we’ve come in a post-Terri Schiavo world. The Hippocratic oath, which has essentially been meaningless since they stripped out the admonition not to perform abortions, is now in tatters, part of the flotsam and jetsam that was one the Gulf Coast.
I hope that, but don’t expect, the authorities will conduct an investigation and bring to justice those who committed murder, because that’s what this is. Doctors, who have been given the power of life and death and yet have been stripped of any sense that there is an objective morality, made active decisions about who would live and who would die.
Dom asks:
What do the looters and rapists have to do with giving critical care to patients?
Nothing. Unless critical care means cooking up a hot shot of dope and taking a life instead of a TV set or someone’s innocence. Birds of a feather…
I would not be too quick to believe this report since we all know that the media have been known to invent stories that suit their purposes, even if it is just to sensationalize a very terrible situation.
Many people probably were close to dying and couldn’t be moved or moved without agony—it doesn’t sound like a Nazi mentality, just medical staff with hard decisions and not much time in which to function. We don’t know the whole situation.
I’ve read this report as well, a couple of days ago, and have been thinking about it some.
The hospitals were being evacuated. What if some of the dying patients could not be moved as the report indicates? What does a doctor do with a dying patient who cannot be moved and cannot be left behind because thugs are breaking into hospitals in search of drugs. Do you leave the patient to the tender mercies of someone bent on illegal activity? To the possibility that the water will come in and drown the patient who is helpless? Do you stay with the patient who is dying, and thereby neglect the patients who are living, being moved, and in need of your care?
Pray for God’s mercy on your soul if you killed an innocent human being.
Scary. I am an RN and I have signed up to do 2 wks on the Navy hospital ship, the Comfort, which – last time I checked – was docked in Pascagoula, MS. Don’t know where it will be by the time I get there.
I am a bit nervous about the unknown, but that was a situation (euthanizing patients) that I had not even thought of! Not that I would expect to encounter it on a Navy hospital ship. I am guessing that even on the ground that kind of behavior is not widespread. I can’t imagine most MDs doing that, even under dire circumstances. I do agree though that removing the part of the Hippocratic oath that references abortions was a tragic (or perhaps “evil” would be a better word?) move.
Anyone here know anything about the Comfort? Their website doesn’t give a whole lot of information.
Best –
The right thing to always ask is What would Jesus have done? We know – He would stay behind with the weak and sick to explain to the looters that they’re not to harm the innocent – even if it meant martyrdom, no matter. At the very least, a humane thing would be to leave behind written signs explaining that the weak and ill are to be left alone – to be picked up as soon as possible. And with God working in mysterious ways, any given looter could have a conversion of heart based on what he sees or hears in a patient’s eyes or words. We just don’t know. If this account is true, it’s sad indeed!
I understand that med students no longer swear the Hippocratic oath, nor are medical ethics taught in undergrad med school.
One of the quotes we got over here (in UK) was a woman doctor (presumably ‘junior’) who said she didn’t really know what she was doing (morally, not clinically) when she was instructed to give morphine overdoses to the patients by her superior but she ‘hoped’ it was the right thing.
I don’t think that any doctor any day soon will be arrested and arraigned for murder for this sorry affair.
I hope people caught this line in the article Dom linked, “Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana and the doctors spoke only on condition on anonymity.”
Doesn’t this make the reporters on this story some kind of accessory after the fact since they are cooperating with the doctors by hiding the identity of people who literally committed murder?