Playing God

Playing God names the charge that doctors crossed from caring for patients into claiming the power to decide who should live or die. The phrase becomes a public frame for the deaths at Memorial Medical Center, but the book places it beside quieter scenes of faith and care, where the work of medicine is described not as mastery over death but as an effort to comfort people in circumstances beyond anyone’s control.

From disaster to accusation

In a late-December television teaser, anchor John King presented the story as a turn from an act of God to playing God, introducing allegations of intentional killing and the concern that one doctor might have done the unthinkable. The formulation compressed a complicated hospital crisis into a stark moral contrast: catastrophe on one side, human agency on the other. It did not itself establish what had happened; it announced the accusation as the lens through which viewers would encounter the case.

Charles Foti sharpened that frame after the arrests. He distinguished the accused medical professionals from the other doctors and nurses who had worked under adverse conditions, saying that the three had abused their professional rights and had acted as though they might be God. The distinction made the phrase more than a general expression of outrage at disaster response: it focused attention on whether particular caregivers had exceeded the authority entrusted to them.

The question of authority

Carrie Everett voiced the accusation as a question during a CNN broadcast marking the Katrina anniversary: “Who gave them the right to play God?” Her repeated question made authorization the issue. The concern was not only that patients died in a crisis, but that caregivers might have taken upon themselves a decision no professional role could justify. In this public language, playing God is a claim about power and its limits.

The book also records a different account of Anna Pou’s relation to her patients. In a conversation with a couple who treated her with gratitude, Pou said that her lawyer would not let her discuss the case, but that she had loved all her patients and would never have wanted to hurt any of them. The exchange does not settle the dispute over her actions. It sets the public accusation against Pou’s own stated understanding of her care, leaving the conflict between alleged conduct and professed intention visible rather than resolving it by assertion.

Care, faith, and human limits

John Thiele’s moral vocabulary offers a contrast to the idea of assuming divine authority. A Catholic influenced by the Jesuit priest Father Harry Tompson, his mentor in how to live and treat people, Thiele recalled the Golden Rule and the medical-school motto “Heal Frequently, Cure Sometimes, Comfort Always.” With almost no control over the situation, he understood comfort as the work still available to him. The motto places limits on medicine without treating those limits as permission to claim power over life and death.

Religious practice appears elsewhere as a form of care sustained in ordinary actions. A hospital announcement invited everyone to a prayer service at ten thirty in the morning. At LifeCare Hospitals of New Orleans, Angela, despite exhaustion and anxiety about a sibling near the levees, cared for her mother, Wilda, and spoke, sang, and prayed with her. Wilda had been known for reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-Third and Ninety-First Psalms; before the storm, staff had gathered for prayer sessions they called church. These scenes show faith functioning as companionship and support, not as a claim to control outcomes.

The accusation and its counterpoint

After Pou’s arrest, her mother urged her to entrust herself to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to hope and trust. Pou’s husband, Vince Panepinto, told her how painful it was to see her facing the case after years of work and sacrifice. Friends brought Pou a silver medal depicting Our Lady of Prompt Succor, associated with prayers for swift intercession, and encouraged her to wear it. Later, when Pou felt alone, an old friend invited her to Father Seelos Shrine and St. Mary’s Assumption Church as a place for healing. These details do not answer the accusation; they show the personal and religious forms of support surrounding someone publicly cast as having claimed godlike authority.

Across these contrasting scenes, Playing God remains a contested moral label rather than a verdict supplied by the phrase itself. Public speakers use it to insist that medical power has boundaries; the accounts of Thiele, Angela, Wilda, and Pou show how care is also understood through duty, prayer, comfort, and personal allegiance. The tension lies between an accusation about decisions over life and death and a bedside ideal centered on serving patients without pretending that medicine can command the circumstances of their deaths.