Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande

Author:Atul Gawande [Gawande, Atul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780805082111
Google: Mnpp8pDvDlIC
Amazon: 0312427654
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 2007-04-03T07:00:00+00:00

IT IS NOT easy to find answers to these questions. Medical personnel who help with executions are difficult to identify and reluctant to discuss their roles, even when offered anonymity. Among the fifteen I was able to locate, however, I found four physicians and one nurse who agreed to speak with me; collectively, they have helped with at least forty-five executions. None were zealots for the death penalty, and none had a simple explanation for why they did this work. The role, most said, had crept up on them.

Dr. A has helped with about eight executions in his state. He was extremely uncomfortable talking about the subject. Nonetheless, he ultimately agreed to tell me his story.

Almost sixty years old, he is board certified in internal medicine and critical care, and he and his family have lived in their small town for thirty years. He is well respected. Almost everyone of local standing comes to see him as their primary care physician--the bankers, his fellow doctors, the mayor. Among his patients is the warden of the maximum-security prison that happens to be in his town. One day several years ago, the two of them got talking during an appointment. The warden complained of difficulties staffing the prison clinic and asked Dr. A if he would be willing to see prisoners there occasionally. Dr. A said he would. He'd have made more money in his own clinic--the prison paid sixty-five dollars an hour--but the prison was important to the community, he liked the warden, and it was just a few hours of work a month. He was happy to help.

Then, a year or two later, the warden asked him for help with a different problem. The state had a death penalty, and the legislature had voted to use lethal injection exclusively. The executions were to be carried out in the warden's prison. He needed doctors, he said. Would Dr. A help? He would not have to deliver the lethal injection. He would just help with cardiac monitoring. The warden gave the doctor time to consider the request.

"My wife didn't like it," Dr. A told me. "She said, 'Why do you want to go there?'" But he felt torn. "I knew something about the past of these killers." One of them had killed a mother of three during a convenience-store robbery and then, while getting away, shot a man who was standing at his car. Another convict had kidnapped, raped, and strangled to death an eleven-year-old girl. "I do not have a very strong conviction about the death penalty, but I don't feel anything negative about it for such people either. The execution order was given legally by the court. And morally, if you think about the animal behavior of some of these people. . . ." Ultimately, he decided to participate, he said, because he was only helping with monitoring, because he was needed by the warden and his community, because the sentence was society's order, and because the punishment did not seem wrong.

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