How Doctors Die ~Ken Murray

Ken Murray, a well-experienced physician, wrote an essay called "How Doctors Die". He had been interviewed by The New York Times and studied at the University of Southern California. He wrote the essay in 2011. From his time being a doctor, he was able to write about the many experiences he had encountered, and more importantly, his ideas about the way doctors choose to die. I believe, in his essay, he tried to make two points. He wanted to explain to the

Dying with Dignity
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readers that doctors choose to die with less medical treatment because they have witnessed the pain that they're patients go through when overmedicated to live longer. His second purpose was to explain that people should be able to die the way that they choose. whether it is in a hospital on thousands of drugs, or at home peacefully. He used an anecdote of his life to further explain the second point. He had once cared for an older man named Jack. He writes, "The doctors did everything possible to resuscitate him and put him on life support with ICU. This was Jack's worst nightmare... I turned off life support machines and sat with him. He died two hours later." (234) Jack's wishes were to die without life support. Although the "system had intervened" (234), Murray felt that he should allow Jack to die the way he wanted. Murray also used a rhetorical question in his writing, "How can anyone do that to their family members?" (232) He says that the doctors in the hospital would ask each other this question after families would put a sick member on life support, which would only draw out the suffering. Using the question allows the audience to think and imagine what would happen if they were in the situation. This was an easy essay to relate to the one I had previously read, which was about a man, Dudley Clendinen, who suffered from Lou Gehrig's disease, but decided that he would die on his own, peacefully. In this way, Clendinen went the route that Murray would have wanted him to take. I think Murray's audience could have been anyone, but definitely wrote for medics like himself. He wrote with truth and used scenarios that he had experienced to help his message get through to the readers. He opened his opinion to the public, saying that you shouldn't have to leave it to others to decide how death goes. You should be able to end your own life the way you want, if you have the choice. With dignity. He did a great job of expressing his message through his story.