‘Dying in Dignity’

In regard to “Speaking Out for Dying in Dignity” (Part II, Aug 28), I must say that Deputy Dist. Atty. Harris’ commitment to prosecute nurse Linda Rangel because “a message had to be sent to the medical community that responsibilities must be clearly defined . . . “ reeks of the attitudes that prevail in American medicine and that have driven good nurses out of the modern torture chambers that pass as hospitals.

The attending doctor did impose his conviction “. . . that no patient must ever be allowed to die regardless of his condition or the extent of his illness . . . “ on a patient who had clearly and through legal channels taken pains to have placed on his chart a document explicitly stating that he did not wish to be sustained by mechanical means.

This doctor ignored the repeated pleas of the wife of the patient to stop performing the elaborate and pain-giving and exorbitantly expensive procedures on her husband, who had been declared in an irreversible, hopeless condition.

Who is this deputy district attorney who is willing to accept an anonymous letter as evidence and to prosecute a nurse for holding the classical view of medicine that reserves heroic measures for those who can have life after the living death of a machinery-sustained existence?

MARY M. MORABITO

Temple City