Clark, Brian: 1932 - 2021

Whose Life Is It Anyway?, 1978 - Summary

The sculptor Ken Harrison is badly injured in a car accident and finds himself in the middle of life permanently paralyzed below the neck and dependent on others for his care and survival. Ken is a strong-minded, passionate man totally dedicated to his art, and he decides he does not want to go on with the compromised, highly dependent life that his doctors, his girlfriend Pat, and others urge on him. He breaks up with Pat and fights to be released from the hospital, to gain control of his life in order to stop the care that keeps him alive and unhappy. His antagonist is the hospital's medical director Dr. Emerson, who believes in preserving life no matter what, and so tries to get Ken committed as clinically depressed. Ken's attending physician, Dr. Scott, begins with the establishment but gradually moves toward Ken's position. The play ends with the judge at a legal hearing deciding that Ken is not clinically depressed and that he thus has the right to refuse treatment and be discharged. In the last scene, Ken lies in a hospital bed framed by his own sculptural realization of the forearm and hand of God from Michelangelo's Creation of Man.
Woodcock, John
Excerpted, with permission, from the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database at New York University School of Medicine, © New York University.