Five Days at Memorial

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

Cover of Five Days at Memorial
Author	Sheri Fink
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Memorial Medical Center and Hurricane Katrina
Genre	Non-fiction
Publisher	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date	September 10, 2013
Media type	Print, e-book
Pages	576
ISBN	978-0-307-71898-3

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital is a 2013 non-fiction book by the American journalist Sheri Fink. The book details the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in August 2005, and is an expansion of a Pulitzer Prize-winning article written by Fink and published in The New York Times Magazine in 2009. It describes the events that took place at Memorial Medical Center over five days as thousands of people were trapped in the hospital without power. The triage system put into effect deprioritized critically ill patients for evacuation, and it was later alleged that a number of these patients were euthanized by medical and nursing staff shortly before the entire hospital was evacuated on the fifth day of the crisis. Fink examines the legal and political consequences of the decision to euthanize patients and the ethical issues surrounding euthanasia and health care in disaster scenarios. The book was well received by most critics and won three awards, including a National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction.

The book was set to be the basis of the third season of the FX anthology true crime series American Crime Story before being scrapped.^[1] It has been adapted as a miniseries by John Ridley and Carlton Cuse for Apple TV+.^[2]