Dax Cowart passed away on April 28th.
The name may be familiar to some of you, for reasons I’ll get into shortly. For the rest: Mr. Cowart was horribly burned in an explosion in 1973.
During his treatment, he repeatedly requested that the doctors stop treating him and allow him to die. The doctors refused to honor his wishes.
“I didn’t feel his reaction — ‘I want to die’ — indicated what he really wanted,” Dr. Charles Baxter, an innovator in burn treatment who oversaw much of Mr. Cowart’s care (in 1963 he had tried to save President John F. Kennedy’s life at Parkland Memorial), was quoted as saying in The Sun. “He sort of was like the child who doesn’t want the shot but then holds out his arm to get it.”
Mr. Cowart’s mother, Ada, and the Cowart family lawyer, who were in charge of his care, wanted him to continue treatments, even after Robert B. White, a prominent psychiatrist, declared that he was mentally competent.
After his recovery, Mr. Cowart went on to earn a law degree from Texas Tech. He also became a leading advocate for patient’s rights.
In the face of what he saw as medical paternalism, he argued that patients should have more autonomy over what treatments they receive and a choice in whether they even receive any treatment at all.
In this he joined an ethical debate that led him to lecture at graduate schools, bioethics conferences and hospitals. His story inspired a book of medical and philosophical essays by others under the title “Dax’s Case.” Articles about him were published. The ABC News program “20/20” did a segment about him. And he was the subject of documentaries, “Please Let Me Die” (1974) and “Dax’s Case” (1984).
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“I’m enjoying life now, and it feels good to be alive,” he said at the end of “Dax’s Case.” “I still feel that it was wrong to force me to undergo what I had to to be alive.
“To make this clear,” he added, “if the same thing were to occur tomorrow, and knowing that I could reach this point, I would still not want to be forced to undergo the pain and agony that I had to undergo to be alive now. I would want that choice to lie entirely with myself and no others.”