More than 900 people were shot in Baltimore last year, 301 of them fatally--the deadliest year in the city’s history. The violence has barely abated. So far this year, more than 260 people have been fatally shot in Baltimore. The vast majority of the victims are young black men, and many of them end up at the University of Maryland’s R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. What if there were a way to save more of their lives? A surgeon at Shock Trauma thinks he has found a way. But the technique is both controversial and ethically fraught. Freelance writer Nicola Twilley recently wrote about it for The New Yorker Magazine, in an article titled “Can Hypothermia Save Gunshot Victims?” She joins us. Then, Harriet Washington, a medical ethicist and the author of “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” shares her thoughts on the new technique.
Freezing Gunshot Victims to Save Them
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