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Patient Rights in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest

Hypothesis: In asylums for the mentally ill in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, it was not uncommon for medical personnel ignore patient rights when deciding on a course of treatment for mental illnesses. Some medical decisions were made in the interest making it easier for the staff to care for patients, and to simplify the process of maintaining discipline within the wards.

In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Randle McMurphy is transferred from a prison where he was required to perform hard labor to an asylum for the insane. At first, he is delighted with the change, but McMurphy soon learns that patients like him who have been involuntarily committed to the hospital must remain in the hospital until the medical staff decides they are cured. McMurphy also learns that uncooperative patients can be physically restrained, given treatment with electroshock or even worse can be involuntarily lobotomized. The novel's tone is critical and allegorical. The mental hospital is a metaphor for the oppressive society of the late 1950s. Nurse Ratched is in charge of the ward and she, like society in the 1950s, requires conformity to established norms and has little tolerance for change or for anyone who questions the status quo.

Joel Braslow in The Western Journal of Medicine suggests that with the benefit of hindsight, medical decisions of the recent past including involuntary commitment of the mentally ill and medical practices including electroshock and frontal lobotomies appear cruel and inhumane. However Braslow adds that in every era, physicians believe that they base their medical decisions on their understanding of current medical practices. Thus, whether a physician is bleeding a patient in the middle ages to let out the poisons, or institutionalizing and then over medicating a mentally ill patient, or performing lobotomies, physicians did what they believed was in the patient's best interest. He insists that n...

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Patient Rights in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:13, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1686679.html