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Moral doubt over hospital horror
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The juror was convinced — and, she believed, all of her fellow jurors were, too — that a crime had occurred on that fifth day at Memorial.” So concludes Sheri Fink’s harrowing and minutely detailed description of the hellish events that took place at a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in late August and early September 2005.
The members of the special grand jury convened two years after those desperate days were in agreement that the state of Louisiana should not indict Dr Anna Pou for the murder of four patients during the disaster. Why then, did they nevertheless continue to believe that a “crime had occurred?” The only crime they had been assembled to investigate was homicide, the evidence for and against which they had been studying for weeks. If they thought the 51-year-old surgeon was guilty, why did they let her go free?
There will never be a satisfactory answer to that or to many of the other questions raised since it became public knowledge that 45 corpses, “the largest number of bodies found at any Katrina-struck hospital,” were found in the debris-strewn remnant that had been the interior of Memorial Medical Center. The forensic pathologists consulted by the authorities had unequivocally found that sufficient morphine and a sedative were present in the tissues of the patients Dr Pou was suspected of killing; witnesses had described seeing the accused in the presence of these patients, carrying syringes of the drugs; at least one of the deceased was in no danger of imminent death before the time he was almost certainly injected. Yet, no indictment was brought. The city of New Orleans was in the grip of a whirlwind of catastrophes. The hospital became a quagmire of ever-rising contaminated water, human waste, the rotting bodies of pets that had been taken there for shelter, and the soaked rubble of shattered equipment. The stench was unimaginable. There was justifiable concern that looters would target the hospital’s drug caches. Rescuers and professional personnel were in constant fear for their lives, as gunshots periodically pierced the air.
Working in these tumultuous surroundings day after day, without electricity and often in the dark, sleep-deprived doctors and nurses labored determinedly and often in vain to help the patients entrusted to them, amid their own concern for family members at home and the danger to their possessions posed by the waters. When many of the citizens of New Orleans later called the members of the hospital’s staff, including Dr Pou, heroic in their attention to duty, there was good reason.
It is in the description of these events that Fink, a Stanford-educated physician and a health and science writer, is at her best. What we have here is masterly reporting and the glow of fine writing. In Fink’s telling, the villain of this story is the storm; the heroine, albeit a flawed one, is Anna Pou. According to her colleagues, she was as close to a healing angel as a physician ever gets. She had a reputation for hovering over her patients, even long after they had left her immediate care. A woman of deep religious faith, she prayed with them and with their families. But healing is not always synonymous with curing; it may have been that Dr Pou’s compassion for her fellow human beings already so close to death and in acute danger of worsening got the better of her (and which she has consistently denied).
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