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Doctors The Death Chamber By Atul Gawande Summary

618 Words3 Pages

Atul Gawande, surgeon, professor of surgery at Harvard and public health researcher, explores his view on the death penalty and the research that shook his views. Gawande’s personal view on the death penalty has been transformed by the research conducted for his story “Doctors of the Death Chamber”. In this story doctors and nurses give personal accounts of their controversial roles in prison executions. Gawande’s story about capital punishment raises the question: “Is medicine being used as an instrument of death?” Prior to 1982 the United States carried out executions through hanging, gas chambers, firing squads, and electrocution. These methods were grisly and inhumane. Prisoners sometimes took up to twenty minutes to die. Some had to be electrocuted several times while screaming in agony. In 1977 Dr. Deutsch created a method of execution involving several different kinds of drugs to humanely induce death. Officials liked this method of execution as it medicalized the process and was easier to witness. Gawande makes …show more content…

On February 14, 2006, a United States district court issued an unprecedented ruling in the execution of murderer Michael Morales. In order to uphold the Constitutions Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment California was ordered to have a physician, specifically an anesthesiologist, personally supervise the execution by lethal injection to determine the prisoner’s state of consciousness (p101). The American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) strongly opposed this ruling stating that “Physicians are healers not

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