How Doctors Die

Written by Ken Murray

In Ken Murray’s essay How Doctors Die he addresses the concept of how doctors do not die like normal people because they know the power of modern medicine and the human body’s limits. Murray, a former doctor, uses his prior medical experiences to persuade the reader that most medical professionals do not believe in life-support devices, and would much rather a natural death when the time has come. In addition to using past experiences Murray has gained as being a doctor, he also adds personal stories of his mentor and cousin, both regarding the death process and how both of these men chose a natural death compared to one full of constant medication and endless misery. Murray delivers his ideas to an audience that consists of typical Americans, mostly because he wants to inform other Americans the different opinions that most doctors have of the death process, compared to people of other occupations. Murray has success in achieving his purpose of explaining the differences between how doctors approach death compared to other individuals through the use of irony in one of his past experiences. One of Murray’s former patients was a woman who had clogged blood vessels in her legs, and after much debate Murray performed bypass surgery on her. The irony comes into effect because, “Two weeks later, in the famous medical center in which all of this occurred, she died” (Murray 234). The irony plays a role in this past experience of Murray because the women would have most likely lived longer without the surgery rather than having it. The irony of Murray’s failed medical experience gave insight to his belief that doctors do think of the death process differently than other individuals because of stories such as this that haunt doctors and their views on a natural death. Overall, I do believe that Murray accomplished his purpose of informing the reader about the differences of thought between a doctor and any other individual regarding the death process because of his touch of personal stories and irony of a failed experience. 

Murray and other doctors agree that they would rather have a quicker natural death than one prolonged with the assistance of a life-support device, such like this ventilator. 
This image is from http://darthmed.dathmouth.edu