Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

Sheri Fink documents the medical crisis at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans during the five days following Hurricane Katrina. The narrative examines how the loss of electricity and rising floodwaters caused the hospital’s infrastructure to fail, forcing clinicians to make triage decisions under extreme physical and psychological duress. Fink details the administration of lethal injections to patients deemed unlikely to survive the evacuation, leading to the subsequent criminal investigation of Dr. Anna Pou and several nurses. The text analyzes the clash between clinical ethics and legal standards when disaster protocols collapse, focusing on the specific chemical evidence of morphine and midazolam found during post-mortem exams of the deceased.

Health policy professionals, legal experts, and emergency management coordinators read this account to analyze the failures of disaster preparedness and the ambiguity of medical ethics in catastrophes. Readers gain a technical understanding of how triage systems function when resources are finite and how hospital hierarchies respond to isolation. The book provides a case study on the legal consequences of end-of-life decisions made in crisis zones. By the end, the reader understands the specific regulatory and moral tensions that exist between standard medical care and the utilitarian logic of battlefield medicine.

Outward-looking; a moderate read.

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