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Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Are wingnuts going to target this guy next?
Posted by Jill | 7:03 AM

Is there no end to the professions in which people are at risk from religious fanatics? We all know that judges are in danger; I suspect that medical examiners are next if they don't toe the wingnut line:

People around the world have talked about the life and death of Terri Schiavo, but Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin will get the last word.

For the past month, he has been working on her autopsy. She has taken over his office and consumed his working hours. He appeared for an interview in blue scrubs, looking every bit the wiry medical examiner with his bald head and tiny wire-rimmed glasses.

"That's her and that's her," he says, pointing to piles of documents and boxes of slides stacked all over his office.

And so you must stand in the doorway of his office to look at the old skulls and microscopes and fading picture of his dapper grandfather in knickers and the lifesize pencil drawing of Mr. Spock and Capt. Kirk.

Thogmartin, 41, knows Schiavo's autopsy will probably be the most publicized of his career. He won't talk about it until he is done and estimates it will be two or three more weeks.

He has received hundreds of letters and e-mails about the brain-damaged woman who died March 31, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed. Many ask him to look for signs she wasn't brain-dead or signs of abuse, among the allegations made during the protracted battle between her parents and her husband over whether to keep her alive.

"They are of no consequence to me," says Thogmartin of the letters.

The lively Texan, publicity shy and fiercely protective of his wife's and child's privacy, is known for doing everything by the book. He denied requests from Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, and her husband, Michael Schiavo, to allow their own pathologists to observe the autopsy.

"It is routine in cases of criminal importance to not allow any biased pathology advocates in the morgue," he said. "I'm the independent pathologist."


Suppose Thogmartin confirms that Terri Schiavo had no cerebral cortex and was not abused. Are these idiots going to target him because he didn't produce the results they wanted?

Meanwhile, an op-ed piece in the New York Times today clarifies the differences among coma, brain death, and persistent vegetative state:

The way this subject has been addressed in recent news stories could leave a person bewildered, but the facts are actually straightforward. Brain death should not be confused with a persistent vegetative state or a coma. In brain death, the entire brain irreversibly ceases to function. Everything shuts down: the cerebral cortex, which controls higher functions, as well as the brainstem, which regulates automatic actions like heartbeat and breathing. In a persistent vegetative state, the cerebral cortex has been destroyed, leaving the person incapable of thought or memory, but the brainstem remains intact and functional. A person in a persistent vegetative state can live for years without a mechanical ventilator or other technological support. That was Terry Schiavo's situation. There was no question that she was alive. Her heart and lungs received signals from her brainstem - they didn't need machines to sustain their activity.


Now, if we were an intelligent society, we would have a rational discussion about what makes us human and what makes us alive. But alas, there's too much political hay to be made among those who for all their emphasis on this level of reality as simply a casting call for the hereafter, believe that keeping the human body alive, even before or after it's a body, supersedes all else.
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