Five Days at Memorial

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Pulitzer Prize-winner Sheri Fink's landmark work of narrative nonfiction re-creates the world of a New Orleans hospital ravaged by post-Katrina floodwaters and examines the central question of what doctors and other caregivers owe their patients in the best, and worst, of circumstances. Physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs five days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of the doctors and nurses who struggled to preserve life amidst chaos. After Katrina destroyed the generators that make twenty-first century medicine possible, to be a patient at Memorial meant you were wholly at the mercy of caregivers forced to make a cascade of decisions about whose lives could be preserved and who would most likely die in the face of serious illness and limited medical care. The result was an almost unthinkable tragedy: several health professionals deliberately injected severely ill patients with drugs to hasten their deaths. In an engrossing narrative that exposes the human drama that fuels medicine and the unchartered territory of end-of-life care, Fink brings the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about just how ill-prepared we are as Americans for the impact of large-scale disasters on the most vulnerable among us.