Donald Cowart

Cowart died at the age of 71 on April 28, 2019 from complications of leukemia and liver cancer, in Fallbrook, California.

Fearing he would be unable to regain his former level of activity, he refused treatment en route to the hospital. In the hospital, he has written, he was "forcibly treated for 14 months" despite asking to be allowed to die. He likened some of the treatments – such as bandage replacement and chlorinated baths – to feeling he was being "skinned alive". He was given limited painkillers because of a poor understanding of their risks, and was denied access to legal assistance by which he might have forced treatment to end.

Despite the debilitating effects of his injuries, Cowart graduated from Texas Tech University in 1986 with a law degree, and established his own legal practice as a personal injury attorney. He became notable for the ethical issues he raised over the medical community's efforts to save his life against his wishes. His case is often cited in discussions of medical ethics.

Cowart earned a law degree in 1986 from Texas Tech University. He opened his own law practice, and later worked with trial attorney Robert Hilliard, founder of Hilliard Munoz Gonzales LLC., Corpus Christi, Texas.

Cowart spoke on patient rights in the US and abroad. His life and his reflections on what has happened to him challenged medicine's understanding of itself as a moral practice. A documentary of his plight titled Please Let Me Die was filmed in 1974, with a follow-up documentary titled Dax's Case filmed in 1984. Cowart's case illustrates several issues of patient autonomy.

On July 25, 1973 Cowart was a 25-year-old US Air Force Reserve pilot working with his father, a cattle rancher and real estate broker in Henderson, TX. The accident occurred as they returned to their car after inspecting a tract of land they were considering for purchase. A nearby underground pipeline was leaking propane gas – which unlike natural gas is heavier than air and thus collects in low areas such as the creek bed near which they had parked – and as they started the car the propane exploded.

Donald Herbert Cowart (December 16, 1947 – April 28, 2019), better known as Dax Cowart, was an attorney and a former United States Air Force pilot who served in the Vietnam War. He was born in Henderson, Texas. In 1973, Cowart sustained debilitating injuries from a propane gas explosion that resulted in the loss of his hands and eyes. He suffered significant hearing loss, and was so severely burned over most of his body that the only place where his skin remained undamaged was on the bottom of his feet. Prior to the accident, he was known to his family and friends as Don or Donnie; however, after the accident he changed his first name to Dax because it was a rather uncommon name, easier for him to write, and it helped to avoid the embarrassment he felt after responding to someone he thought was addressing him, only to discover they were addressing someone else with the same name.