Word: cowart
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...twice, in early 1912 and again in the winter of 1912-13. Hence the exhibition is fairly small, only 24 paintings and a large group of sketchbook drawings. It can be seen without sore feet and framed as a whole in one's mind. It is thorough, scholarly -- Jack Cowart, John Elderfield, Pierre Schneider and others have done a fine job on the catalog -- and, above all, full of exhilaratingly beautiful paintings that have lost none of their sensuous finesse and cerebral sharpness in the nearly 80 years since Matisse made them...
Taken to the extreme, this principle can mean ignoring or overriding the patient's express wishes. When Dax Cowart was critically burned in a propane- gas explosion near Henderson, Texas, he begged a passing farmer for a gun with which to kill himself. On his way to the hospital, he pleaded with the medic to let him die. For weeks his life hung by a thread. For more than a year, against his will, he endured excruciating treatment: his right eye and several fingers were removed, his left eye was sewn shut. His pain and his protests were unrelenting...
That was 17 years ago. Cowart is now a law school graduate, married, living in Texas and managing his investments. Yet to this day he argues that doctors violated his right to choose not to be treated. "It doesn't take a genius to know that when you're in that amount of pain, you can either bear it or you can't," he says. "And I couldn't." He still resents the powerlessness of patients who are forced to live when they beg to die. "The physicians say that when a patient is in that much pain...
...Cowart's case, doctors acted paternalistically; they overruled his pleas in the belief that he would one day recover sufficiently to be grateful. But what if there were no chance of recovery: no law school, no wedding, no "life" down the road? Are doctors still obliged to fight on for their patients, even in a losing battle, even against their will? When a patient's time is short and his wishes are clear, many doctors these days would say no to life-at-all-costs heroics. Overtreatment of the terminally ill strikes physicians as both wasteful and inhumane. And patients...