Book review: Five Days at Memorial, by Sheri Fink
Eight years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Floodwaters rose in the Uptown streets surrounding Memorial Medical Centre, where hundreds of people slowly realised they were stranded.
by Sheri Fink
Crown Publishers
5 stars
Jason Berry
Eight years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Floodwaters rose in the Uptown streets surrounding Memorial Medical Centre, where hundreds of people slowly realised they were stranded. The power grid failed, toilets overflowed, stench-filled corridors went dark. Diesel generators gave partial electricity. Hospital staff smashed windows to circulate air.
By day four of the hurricane, the generators had conked out. Fifty-two patients in an intensive care wing lay in sweltering darkness; only a few were able to walk. The doctors and nurses, beyond exhaustion, wondered how many could survive.
When evacuations were done, 244 patients made it out alive; 45 did not. The state of Louisiana began an investigation: forensic consultants determined 20 corpses had elevated levels of morphine and other drugs, and decided that seven were victims of homicide.
In Five Days at Memorial, Dr Sheri Fink explores the excruciating struggle of medical professionals deciding to give fatal injections to those at the brink of death. Fink, a physician turned journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for her investigation of these events in a 2009 joint assignment for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine.
This book is much more than an extension of that report. Although she had the material for a gripping disaster story, Fink has slowed the narrative pulse to investigate situational ethics: what happens when caregivers steeped in medicine's supreme value, preserving life, face traumatic choices as the standards of civilisation collapse.