{"id":1495,"date":"2005-04-01T14:31:42","date_gmt":"2005-04-01T18:31:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1495"},"modified":"2005-04-01T14:31:42","modified_gmt":"2005-04-01T18:31:42","slug":"waiting-for-the-pope-to-die","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1495","title":{"rendered":"Waiting for the Pope to die"},"content":{"rendered":"

I looked up the obituary<\/a> of the Belfast doctor who invented the portable defibrillator, and who died in January this year. I did so because it seemed obvious that a lot of suffering is caused by rescuing heart attack victims and other people who never really come back from the emergency room. Of course, that’s no real argument against defibrillators and similar techniques: just an indication that they have some costs as well as benefits. The great majority of decisions about life and death don’t involve removing tubes, but calling an ambulance in time. By their nature, they are taken very quickly, and without any conscious deliberation.<\/p>\n\n

Still, you’d have thought that the man who invented these devices was in favour of life at almost any cost, and in fact he had survived a terrible time as a Japanese PoW after the fall of Singapore: “Of his group of 7,000, only a few hundred survived. Pantridge himself suffered from prolonged and near fatal cardiac beriberi but was possessed of a fanatical will to live. He never forgave the Japanese for what he saw them do to soldiers and civilians alike.”<\/span><\/p>\n\n

None the less, the obituarist also recorded that during the retreat of his batallion through the Malayan jungle, “Pantridge, in common with other medical officers, ensured that those so severely wounded that they could not be evacuated would never see the enemy.”<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Were all those lives he later saved a way of making up for this?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I looked up the obituary of the Belfast doctor who invented the portable defibrillator, and who died in January this year. I did so because it seemed obvious that a lot of suffering is caused by rescuing heart attack victims … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}